Thanks , It is both rock meshes and landscape. Most assets are from a marketplace pack called Modular Cliffs.
Just checked it out, I have a couple of questions, where did you get the following Railing mesh, is it an asset on the marketplace and if so what one is it? and what are you using for the ocean?
The railing meshes I made myself. There is a modular section and an end section. I baked a low poly version quickly off a more detailed high poly version. I use a blueprint that places instances along a spline so it has only 2 draw calls per railing. The low poly modules are about 450/715 verts each. (see image, interior railing is done the same way.) - Once you have done the initial work it is really fast to place any railing of any kind as long as you stick to the system.
There are examples how to do the blueprint in the “Blueprints” example project you can get for free on the market place.
The Ocean is made from the “Water Materials” package you can get from the marketplace. I had a few hickups to get it working and it still doesn’t really work as it should. First I had to move it to zero height in the level otherwise it wouldn’t work at all. Second there is only a small piece which is a bit high poly so I had to double its size and reduce its polycount and combine it into large sections through instances in a blueprint to get it working as an entire ocean. And I made a fading backplate between sky and ocean. From the distance it is ok but the example in the package is a lot better. I just couldn’t bother to spend a few days to figure out how it works and to adjust it. It is a bit hacked.
Anyone else tried lighting scenarios yet? I haven’t set it up in the build yet but in the editor it only takes a few seconds to load a different lighting scenario atmosphere level. I had to build it three times and place a lit and an unlit version of some light fixtures and a few other meshes into the lighting levels. But is is a good alternative if you don’t want to go fully dynamic and loose visual quality.
Wonderfully done. It almost looked like the opening to a hollywood movie. Though without narration. I was waiting for a helicopter to buzz down and start shooting through the windows. Action hero jumps through window down cliff and into the water. “Cut!!!”
Maybe in unreal 5?
Was the environment the building on terrain or mesh/rock?
Hi , I don’t understand the question. But if you want to know what is mesh and what is landscape imagine the landscape being the “soil” and the meshes being the rocks that stick out of it. (Some rocks are huge, others are very small). If you want to make seamless transitions between both soil and rocks you could use the same world tiling material on both the rock and the landscape. Or you use a material that allows you to vertex paint the (world tiling) landscape material on parts of the rocks. I hope that makes sense to you.
In this project I didn’t use vertex painting or anything complicated. You can see seams if you look out for them. Some obvious seams or covered up with vegetation.
I made a new user interface from scratch, watch the new video below if you want. It works with a controller and mouse/keyboard. You can switch between those at any time.
I’m using color schemes. Instead of having to change individual objects the whole scene changes colors with one click. This way the user can’t have colors selected on several objects that don’t match and ruin the scene. - Technically it can be set up after the lighting has been built. I’m just placing markers in the scene for each material (id) that has to change colors. I decided against being able to swap pieces of furniture. That would require them to be dynamic objects which don’t look that good at the moment. - There is theoretically no limit how many different color schemes you can have and how many objects change at the same time.
Lighting scenarios are a relative new feature and they work very well. (At least in 4.16. They are broken in 4.18 but should work again when 4.19 comes out). The amount of lighting scenarios is only limited by the file size you want to use. This project has 1.8 GB compressed. But you have to build lighting for each scenario separately. It is possible to place different meshes for certain lighting scenarios inside the sub-level. - Using lighting scenarios will give you the quality of a baked scene and you still can show different lighting snap shots. A good compromise at the moment until fully dynamic scenes look better. - This is a big scene and the lighting changes in a few seconds. Each lighting scenario takes about 1 GB of memory on the disk.
I learned blue printing and made the user interface from scratch. The controls are as simple as possible so the user can’t get stuck in sub-menus. You click one button to toggle the user interface and one to take a screenshot. Everything else is self explaining hopefully. - The icons may change over time. Currently they use the material design from google.
Here is the final link for downloading the project. It is 1.8 GB compressed. When you run it for the first time give it a few seconds to stream all textures in and to compile the shaders. Some computers seem to do better than others with that.
Amazing! Congratulations. 
Great work!
I was also looking at getting that HAL system a while ago but looks like it’s been discontinued now. Big shame for the archiviz people as that was one of a kind.
Anyone here got any insight into if the HAL will make a return? Or if it’s possible to get an updated version of it for 4.18+ from anywhere?
looking for it, like you!
You should put the railings on the marketplace, I would buy a blueprint with those in a heartbeat
I migrated the HAL user interface from the last version available to the version I used for this project (4.16) and it does work fine except for the automatic render stage that renders the preview images for swapping meshes and materials So I had to place those thumbs manually.
I got HAL working the same way in 4.17 and 4.18 but I couldn’t use any of these newer versions because 4.17 breaks the instance static mesh actors and 4.18 breaks the lighting scenarios.
At the end I decided to make my own interface. Here are the reasons:
- potential clients I showed the project were complaining about the interface. It does look a bit dated and with all the cool features it has it often lets people get lost in the sub menus and they get stuck and keep running around with the camera controls on or other weird things. So I generally wanted to make the controls as simple as possible.
- swapping materials and meshes require to replace the mesh with a blueprint and that means having to rebuild the lighting. (Especially bad when you have multiple lighting scenarios). It also requires those meshes to be dynamic. So I decided to just swap materials (although you could potentially swap meshes by using different lighting scenario).
- can only swap individual objects but most clients prefer to have two or more color schemes instead. They want a lot of objects to swap the materials at the same time. Otherwise you can end up having a lot of colors or assets selected that don’t match.
- wanted to swap the static lighting with “lighting scenarios” from day to sunset to night on the fly.
So I finished this project now. Here is a new slightly shorter video:
It is build with unreal 4.16 for now. I hope 4.19 will fix problems with the lighting scenarios introduced in 4.18 because they are a great feature. In this project you can switch between 3 pre-computed lighting builds: day, sunset and night. The switch takes about 3 seconds. You can also choose between 2 colour variations where most major materials get swapped out with one button click. I made a new interface that supports these two features.
It runs pretty well on a higher end computer. But it also runs with 15 fps on my media PC which has a current generation Pentium (!) CPU with 4GB of RAM and a 2GB Asus GT730 silent video card.
Awesome! You should think about selling the project in the marketplace.
So I finally made an animation video for this scene.
It is the same content as the real time scene. I just replaced one of the beds and updated a couple of materials. I’m using the afternoon lighting as it has the most dramatic shadows and a warm colours. I converted the project from 4.16 through the versions up to 4.21 without any big problems at the end.
I’ll post a shorter real time walk-through with the new interface and a panorama web tour soon.
So good project. How make this light change night and day ? İs this layer ?