Hey guys!
It’s been years since i’ve posted here, and im a frequent lurker, so why the heck not throw up some personal work to keep my motivation going, as well as maybe get some feedback from people who actually know what they are doing!
I have goals to extend this project to something more than just a wanderable scene, but for now i’m having lots of fun noodling on the environment:
https://i.imgur.com/bkcRCGo.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/UnoGRZT.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/zlwWmmo.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/d8qoW3m.png
I’m hand modelling all of this in maya, here’s a screen of my current greyboxing (it’s a wild west in the scene file eek):
https://i.imgur.com/I2W7tW4.png
Foliage is done in Speedtree (no surprises there) with the textures created in substance:
https://i.imgur.com/NWNkyKm.png
Rocks are hand modelled meshes with 3 tiling textures vertex blended across (still working the look out)
I’m particularly interested if anyone has some good tips on wind systems in UE4, as well as some good grass tips - the grass looks pretty cool but its very mesh heavy at 1k verts per instance (yikes). Turns out you have to tackle things differently for a top down perspective…
Feedback is always welcome! I’m chipping away at this daily so expect some updates 
This looks very satisfying
Thanks my dude!
So here’s some screens of where we are currently:
https://i.imgur.com/jppY2wG.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/8XN244L.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/QdZF1at.jpg
Major change is that i I took some time to figure out a nicer way to do the rocks as i wasn’t happy with the way i was doing them. I ended up re-doing my rock textures in substance and tessellating the **** out of the meshes, and i think it’s worked out well so far. Just got to run with it now and really sink some love into finalizing the textures. I also swapped over my skylight to movable to get some sweet DFAO action happening.
After discovering the
mel command in maya (seriously this blew my mind) i went through and gave my cliff meshes some even topology and some nice flat UV’s. This seemed to stop any unsightly long triangles from appearing in the final tessellation.
https://i.imgur.com/NJVKmtS.png
https://i.imgur.com/3eL7zbB.png
https://i.imgur.com/HbD2ZoJ.png
Lastly, i drastically cut up the playable area to accommodate a wider section in the middle for some mysterious ruins to happen. If people like pen and paper concept sketches of what i’m planning to make i’m happy to throw some up if people are curious!
Progress is moving at a pace. I’ve defined the “ruin” area some more and placed in some textures to help sell what exactly it is, and for now i’m happy where everything is headed.
The floor cobblestone is treated with a bit of parallax occlusion to sell the depth of the tiles, and a bonus i can use the pixel depth offset to get the mesh intersections looking non-uniform.
I played around with some edge normal decals for the ruins, but ultimately i couldn’t get clean reads on the edges and scrapped it. For now its tiling textures with baked normals layered in when needed.
