After working on the vineyard competition, I really enjoyed creating these little vignettes to study and improve my lighting and scene composition. Here are a few post-vineyard-competition studies. I’ll continue to post in this thread to track my progress and improvements over time. Any and all comments/ criticism/advice welcome.
This evenings practice was basically exploring the grasslands content from infinity blade now available in the marketplace. Built a basic terrain in world machine and quickly threw together a landscape material. Dropped a few a the ruins together as well.
Tonight’s observation comes from the vineyard submission. In this study, I’ve abstracted several moments from the design process and put them into a context of ‘point, line, plane’ composition. In many lights, I think this would have been a much stronger submission or approach during the competition.
I really like this one. Can you post a larger screenshot please?
thanks Jacky, sure thing.
was using the dynamic sky, so clouds/time/lighting are a little different…
Yeah, really nice. 
Thanks.
Since you were using dynamic lighting you should try another shot with distance field AO enabled to improve the looks of that tower(not the foliage) - if the tower can generate proper distance field mesh, of course.
was interesting to see the indirect impact of that. the tower has much better definition now with distance fields, but i had to adjust a bunch of post process settings like gain/gamma/contrast and include ambient cubemap to lighten up the scene a bit too. the original image has a much softer foliage feel to it that i like, but i like the definition of the tower. i’m guessing a pixel depth offset material might fix this issue. have you used pixel depth offset at all help foliage in a distance field scene? (or is there a way to exclude it?). i’ve checked ‘distance as if two sided’ and also tried with a resolution scale of zero to see if it disables from calcs, but seem to still be getting harsher foliage now.
You should be able to disable DFAO for foliage instances in the foliage tool. That way you can have DFAO only for the tower. It really helps change the looks of environments with no direct lighting/overcast weather.
Stepping away from the grasslands at the moment and exploring another world machine terrain build with landscape materials using a glacier palette. Using a couple different Icelands marketplace texture assets in this scenario. The environment art learning path continues…
