I’ve been working a lot on a somewhat overambitious project lately, and decided I needed to spend some time working on something with a different set of challenges for fun! I’ve always been a fan of low poly art, so i decided to give it my best shot. I started creating the environment last night, its now about 6AM here so I pulled an all-nighter but I’m happy with my progress so far. Note that the screenshots here were taken somewhat sporadically throughout development so you should notice some visual changes. This landscape is created by piecing multiple low-poly meshes together rather than using the landscape tool. I still want to expand on this environment, as it’ll ultimately be a fairly large island. I’ll probably blend the highlands area pictured here into a more grassy forest area, and then into a beach. I still need to figure out a good low poly river and ocean shader! The ultimate plan for this environment is to be a more light-hearted take on the survival genre, where the player will spawn as one of a handful of types of animals in an open world multiplayer environment. The player’s animal is randomly chosen, but influenced depending on the current needs of the ecosystem (the current distribution of player controlled animals on the server), and also partially by the player’s performance in a previous life. The idea is that each player’s gameplay experience will differ depending on their place in the food web. They could be hiding from predators while gathering fruits and nuts to bring to their nest, or they could find themselves stalking a player controlled buck.
This is still in the super early stages of development, so I’m still planning things out I suppose, I’m more than open to any input or suggestions! Anyway, here are some more images of the environment thus far. Please note that I did not make every asset shown in the images. Some are made by me, some are marketplace assets.
Thanks so much for the kind words guys! I’m gonna get back to work on this in a bit. I’m actually having issues getting the grass material node to work with static meshes for some reason, hopefully its an easy fix. I’m getting a lot of use out of the assets that I have but I’m going to need to make some more rocks and foliage. I also need to get some more low poly animal models…
Thank you! That part of the post processing volume was actually created by The Furryous Animal on the UE4 marketplace, I merely adapted it and combined it with one of my own volumes to achieve the effect (the depth of field in the photo is mostly for the screenshot, I still have a lot of tinkering to do with it.). That said, here’s a tutorial you can use to achieve the same outlining effect Tutorial – Creating outline effect around objects | Unreal Engine 4 blog
It is based on distance, the closer the object the more thick the outline will be (to a point). I agree its a bit distracting on the grass but I really like its effect on the trees and deer.
Hey there, first question was asked and answered! I used UE4 to create the environment, but I did NOT use the landscape tool. The landscape is composed of many rescaled, retextured, rotated meshes using complex collision.
I’ve done a fair bit of 2D interface work using outlined objects and the lines are a real pain to get right. What is bothering me here is that the line is the highest resolution and highest contrast component of the actor. Essentially the outer edges of the object, which are further from the eye than, say, the belly of the deer, attract too much attention and pop off the screen - making the actor look flatter or concave in various areas. The line flattens the art, stealing some depth from the viewer’s perspective yet the shadows that are cast don’t reflect the same flattening - so I’d guess that this scene in motion would be more confusing to the eye than a still image.
It could be interesting to try the line as a slightly darker shade of the actor’s color - maybe even with a bit of blur so the edges aren’t so hard.
Thanks for your input, that’s a pretty good observation. I’ll take another stab at the effect a little further down the line, I’m afraid I don’t have much experience with this sort of shaders/post processing so I’ll need to do some research.
Small update. I finally finished moving into my new house and had a couple hours to work on this project. I played with post processing and lighting, and started adding the forest biome into the mix. Still a long way to go on this. Also working on modeling some new critters.
