I thought I’d share this video showing off an environment that I’ve been working on in my spare time for the past couple of months now. The project originally was just a sandbox environment for me to prototype in and throw assets in quickly to see how they looked but it quickly turned into me making assets for a specific scene. Not all of the sub projects that I tested are in the video since they’re still WIPs
Day and Night cycle ( moon is still a work in progress)
water material with semi dynamic reflections ( the color for the reflections is linked to the linear color curve I created for the skylight light)
various foliage
Landscape materials
The only assets I didn’t create are the clouds (Unreal assets),
the soundtrack which is Atlas - Faux Tales,
and the sound effects are from freesounds.org
Now I did render this out in an image sequence, not that it doesn’t run realtime, i just wanted to capture the best possible quality, I’ve never had much luck retaining quality using either fraps or OBS. most likely I’m doing something wrong
Overall I’m really pleased with how it turned out. It went through a long iteration process and I had a lot of helpful critiques from my friends so thank you to you guys for that
Your water is really good, mat etc etc… the only problem i see is some too dark leafs of your foliage (some trees and shrubs). Not sure if it is a normal problem or if it is due to the lighting (which is really really great imo)…just in case you didn’t know (or for other people ) and referring to this post by example http://polycount.com/discussion/125920/correct-vertex-normals-for-foliage…you have to bent your normal from the origin of your model to ensure the best lighting result (at least for per pixel lighting for your leafs)…not sure, just my two cents.
You’re definitely right about the leaves, they could be lightened up just enough to show a bit of detail on them, I believe it’s a lighting problem. As far as bending the normals, I usually leave frond/fern type tree normals alone. The trees with lots of leaves that have a volumetric look to them are the ones I’ll change vert normals for. Or do most people usually change all foliage normals?
I’d say change all foliage normals and make some rendering tests I found an other useful link i think http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Foliage
Again, you did a really great job , a pleasure for our eyes
Glad yall like it! I definitely want to make updates to it and will certainly have to do some vert normal tests macoll. Though they might take a backseat for a little while since I just started working on the 3d environment art challenge over at ArtStation.
I hope you post more as you make changes from feedback