NINJA EDIT; Lastest updated screenshot;
Well if there’s one thing I learned from my last Unreal Project is that once I’m done with it I’m too lazy to actually do a Work In Progress Thread… Or even a Work thread despite having meticulously taken work in progress screen shots for it.
At most I was arsed to post it on Artsation and you can see it here; ArtStation - The Robot Graveyard
ANYHOW, this time I’ll learn from my mistakes and do this, while I’m working on it, more fun this way anyway no?
Long story short, I’ve started making an Aspen Parkland biome!
[50 FPS!!!]]
Why? As soon as I saw the new Volumetic Update, I had to make something with it…just like every other fool on Artstation…
My final goal is something like this;
I am currently at;
As you can see the only thing that ties my reference and my work are the volumetics and even they aren’t that good. Oh well small steps!
Most of last week I spend trying to optimize my trees and leaning how to properly reduce the ms my basepass takes without having PS2 era trees.
At this point, I have 3 layers of trees, Outermost Island Layer with high poly trees, Transition Trees that are the same as the outer layer ones but with halved resolution and polygons and use their last LOD as a shadow proxy, and internal trees that have solid mesh shadow proxies so that the shadow map depth pass won’t have to go though all those alphas. It causes Some artifacts but you never see them.
Later I’ll see if I can optimize it further with large unified canopy meshes, and simple stick and trunk meshes for the dense regions.
Not a lot of work since, today I wasted trying to set up a second PC with Swarm Agent to bake my lighting faster…Something I’ll probably have to ask for help on soon…
My beautiful trees!
Using Speed Tree For Unreal 4, something I am starting to regret, my fierce optimization efforts have started to clash heavily with how it’s set up and maybe I’ll soon ditch it in favor of Speed Tree Studio so that I can properly export FBX files to Blender.
Oh well, this was a whole lot of Trees talk, I’ll post here further updates.
