Hi all, I am an environment artist/world builder/amateur tech artist
I have been developing a scene for Oculus/Vive as part of my final project for my MFA in Art and Technology at University of Texas Dallas. It’s been in development on and off for a month and a half now, and I’m at a happy point to show it off to the world. All models, landscapes, materials, lighting, etc. are my work, with the exception of shrubs, orange trees, and rock meshes, all of which I mildly edited to fit my intended look. For this project, I wanted to achieve a highly stylized look and unique look. I did this by running each texture I find/make through Photoshop’s Oil Paint filter, including normal maps. This gives an interesting effect I feel has not been widely seen in real-time environments so far, especially in VR. Check out the pictures below! Thank you for your time, and feel free to tear it apart. Some pictures will have bolded descrips, be sure to read, if interested.
I really wanted to take advantage of Unreal’s flawless two-sided material preset. I liked the idea of having light bleed through the dense grass, giving it a soft wispy look. I used a gradient mask to fade out the, eh for lack of better words, “sub-surfiness” for the Sub-surface color node input, so that towards the bottom of the grass, not as much light can bleed through.
Note that even the cloud textures were run through the Oil Paint filter. Clouds also use a heavy depth fade for the zeppelin in the first picture, which slowly pans across the sky.
With this project, I have been wanting to brush up on my organic modeling skills. I’m still not terribly comfortable with organic forms beyond basic rock meshes, which I plan to keep working on.
**In addition to a sunset scene, I’m also working on a night time rainy version, for my fellow rain lovers. **
I thought it’d be cool to share a neat shader trick I did with the grass material to make it appear like it’s blowing in the wind. Basically, in addition to the actual normal map, I used a blend overlay node to overlay two additional “wave” normal maps that bi-directionally scroll. The overlay makes sure that the two additional normals don’t just sit on top of the grass normal, but actually mix with it so to speak.
So that’s it!
When I’m finished with this envy, I plan to release it for free, not really sure where (UE4 Marketplace?). Also, I’m optimizing it as best I can, but I get perfect framerate on a DK2 on a 980TI.