External Archviz - Landscape and foliage studies

Development Architectural and Design Visualization
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I’m using a combination of Cascaded Shadow Maps and Ray Traced Distance Field shadows. Distance Field Soft Shadows in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.3 Documentation
It’s strange that you are not getting static shadows on your grass though… Is it a static mesh?

Thanks, man :smiley:

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Hello guys, okay?

My pc is a i7 2600, 8gb of ram. I had a video card nvidia frame 600. switched to gtx 960 and now I have 16gb of ram.
  Do you have any tips on some configuration in U4? I’m using it as standard. With this PC configuration must set something in unreal?

Thanks! and beautiful work !!

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I have a similar configuration. It’s a nice config for most kind of projects in Unreal. :slight_smile:

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So you are not using any baked lighting anymore? I tried baking the light for my building and after that, switch the skylight to movable to get access to distance field shadowing, but its not compatible with each other :frowning:

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I’m still using baked lighting. Dynamic skylight is only necessary for Distance Field Ambient Occlusion, you don’t need it to cast Ray Traced Distance Field shadows. Just turn it on under your sunlight Directional Light properties and it’ll work.

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Looking great as always dude!

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Hi,

Very nice…I am too learning UE4 you are way ahead of me. I did not read all the posts as there are to many. But I have some questions as too how you handle the sloping grade near the house using UE4’s landscape mesh? I made the actual site from Terrasculptor with dem info. Then generated a height map to generate my landscape mesh in UE4. The thing is the quads are huge on the UE4 mesh and I can not sculpt the site near the house and I have huge gaps between the house and the site mesh. How did you get such nice sloping grade close to the house with UE4s landscape mesh?

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Thanks, my friend :slight_smile:

The terrain near the house (10m margin) is just another mesh imported from 3DS with the house itself. Then I adjusted the Unreal terrain to go just beneath that imported terrain. It’s almost like cover a crater with a plate (the imported mesh). Then you can blend the intersection with foliage.

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That is how my set up is too. But I still have a few problem areas. Do you know if the UE4 landscape mesh can be subdivided in certain areas to allow for fine sculpting?

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I don’t think so… You can achieve similar result with another technique though. For example, instead of creating a huge 500x500m terrain and add more detail to certain area, create four 250x250m side by side and add a lot of segments just for the instance you’ll need extra detail.

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Very nice! Looking better and better for each iteration. Quite inspiring to see such a big and good looking outdoor scene =)

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Wow! That video looks stunning!

I’m curious about those reflections at 0:40- are they just standard SSR or did you bake a cubemap? They look really nice and very real! I’ve found glass is very hard to get right in UE4 but you nailed it!

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Thanks, man!

Yeah, they are baked. I’ve used a scene capture cube. They are sharper than the ordinary reflection capture, but still too artificial… UE4 still lacks nice and precise reflections for mirror like surfaces… Hope they come up with a solution for that soon, it’s essential for archviz…:stuck_out_tongue:

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Your work is inspiring. Really nice job!

Is there any tutorial that would help me understand how to use cubemaps for a mirror?

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That looks really good! Great work.
We worked on an outdoor project our self lately and had some issues with foliage performance and so on…
How did you create the really dense, small grass around the pool/house?
Could you show some single asset-shots of the foliage actors you used there?
Is that part of the grass statically lit or dynamically as the rest of your scene?

Do you use any kind of LOD/Distance-Cull?

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As in the previous project Archviz Project … Very nice decent rendering… which I couldn’t reach even for a small house :frowning:
although I did as you had mentioned in that project (talking about the light settings) in post #46](Archviz Project - Work in Progress - Unreal Engine Forums) where you said (The lighting settings are simple, just a lightsource and a skylight. For the post processing, I’m using a custom LUT…)
may be the key was the (LUT) you had used; which I wish if you can share it with us to try …:cool:
My best wishes…:slight_smile:
and waiting for more success.

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Same here… a nice guy promising to make a tutorial as soon as he can https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHcGKs0uqLo

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It’s simple.

  1. Add a “Scene Capture Cube” in your scene (it will look like a camera in the viewport).
  2. Create a new “Cube Render Target” in your content browser (it’s under "Materials & Textures).
  3. Add the Cube Render Target you’ve just created in the “Texture Target” on Scene Capture Cube details:

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  1. Now you can add the “Cube Render Target” as a node in your material. Combine it with a color and plug it in the Base Color channel of the material to fake the reflection. Don’t forget the “Reflection Vector” node to adjust the coordinates properly. Example:

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Note that the location of your Scene Capture Cube is very important as it will determine the center of your cubemap. You can think of it as a replacement for the default Reflection Capture, but with the possibility of increasing the resolution (under Cube Render Target details) and with real time capture (it will be much more expensive because of that). You can disable the real time capture under the Scene Capture Cube details panel (disabling “Capture Every Frame”).

The short grass is dynamically lit. It consumes too much RAM to use lightmaps on them, but that would definitely improve the framerate…
I use a SpeedTree asset and it has 3 levels of LOD. You can find the details here: Lawn Grass Archviz - Architectural and Design Visualization - Epic Developer Community Forums and here: Project - Architecture - Epic Developer Community Forums

I create my LUTs in Photoshop and they are different for each project. After building my scene, I set all the properties in the Post Process Volume to zero to get the cleanest possible image sample. Than I take a screenshot and work on it with Photoshop to get the results I want and generate the LUT as described here. Color Grading and the Filmic Tonemapper in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.3 Documentation

I would share those specific LUT if I still had it :p. After importing it in UE4, I just delete the png asset (it is useless for me since I never reuse them). Is there a way to extract it from UE4? If there is a way to do that, just let me know and I upload it somewhere.

This method consists of a blueprint algorithm to place and move a camera at your reflection’s point of view (since this is how true reflection works). I demands work to update that point of view every time you move and replace it every time you change cameras (when making a matinee video, for example). And it also has troubles with stuff behind that wall where you want your reflections. Since the reflection’s camera is going to be “inside” the wall, all the stuff between the reflection’s eye and the wall must be hidden somehow.

I don’t know why UE4 doesn’t have a realtime reflection technique built in like UE3 has. It’s an important feature…