Lately i have been pulling myself through the motions of learning some UE4, and so far i have been thoroughly enjoying myself! (minus a few hair pulling moments mind you )
This snowy/rocky/landscape scene i am building for a university project. Hopefully if all works out and time doesn’t get the better of me, i will be doing a fly-through of the scene to be used with the Oculus Rift. Similar to the multitude of rollercoaster Rift demos out there, only less nauseating and more calming
So feedback is much appreciated! I’m still very very green when it comes to anything game related, so bear with me…
Hiya! I used a mixture of Maya and Zbrush for creating the rocks, and Zbrush, Xnormal, Knald and Headus for the UV’s and Map generation.
I’ve been through many iterations of the rocks. What i finally settled on sculpting a fairly hi-res version in Zbrush, and then in Unreal tiling a couple of normals maps for mid and up-close detail. Both the Tiling maps i also sculpted in Zbrush using a variety of brushes and alphas. I also just run the Hi-Res mesh through Decimation master to get a rough, but fairly low poly mesh for baking. For this project i suppose i’m not too concerned with poly count - yet
Sometimes when i sleep at night i dream of rocks. Should i be concerned??!
Looks fantastic With the snow, is that done by materials figuring out which part points up or did you texture it in? I only ask because I was just wondering how to do it in materials earlier :eek:
I added a squished half-sphere with a sky texture mapped to it as a placeholder sky. The blue sky was getting really distracting.
I also fleshed out some more of the level and placed more rocks around. I think later on i will make some more unique meshes to replace some of the cliffs, but for now it will do.
Anyone know of a good tut on creating snow particle effects? I looked at the effects cave and i just got super confused. Perhaps its time to learn some of the cascade editor!
I noticed in your material you’re breaking apart your material attributes to hook them up. In the material’s properties you can enable ]Use material attributes, this will make the material one pin. I also notice you’re breaking off to do a per-object normal map. To do that with material layers just use MatLayerBlend_BakedNormal.
One critique though…I would say that the rock texture (while it looks awesome) tiles pretty badly. In some of the first shots you can clearly see it. Maybe you could revisit this one (or hide it somehow :D)
If you go for a 2k size, you could really add some more features (so that the texture represents a larger part of a rock than what it looks like it does right now)
I tried out the _BakedNormal method and it worked a treat Thanks very much!
Ah your totally right. The tiling texture i sculpted isn’t as hi-res as it could be anyway, so i’ll revisit it and post up some screens. I appreciate the feedback
> The tiling texture i sculpted isn’t as hi-res as it could be anyway, so i’ll revisit it and post up some screens.
Your scene is looking great so far. For working on more detailed rocks you might find this pixologic article useful it talks about making the high-res rock surfaces for that movie Immortals using zbrush. There’s a pretty good break down of his workflow on page 2.
****, i dont see why not I’m by far no pro at this kind of thing, but i could at shed some light on my sculpting process. Or at least provide some links to the tutorials i learned off, if your keen
Cheers Grimmx! Inadvertently i actually used the same method they used for the rocks - so it was a cool surprise to see that the pro’s use it too!
So i went back and put some more detail into the tileable texture in zbrush. It now looks more detailed, but it has an ugly - very noticeable - crack that i sculpted into it, and when tiled its very very apparent Suppose that means more sculpting for tomorrow…
I also spent some more time in photoshop trying out some methods to create a decent diffuse texture. Its not too shabby, but as always, feel free to hit me with your feedback stick.
Lastly i went back to my original rock mesh and flattened some of the faces out to provide a cleaner surface for my tiling texture. For such a large scale object, all the detail i sculpted in Zbrush looked really blobby in Unreal. Sort of like marshmellows.
Slowly, ever so slowly, i’m sussing out a good process
Its been a while since i updated some stuff on this thread. Been a little busy.
I wasn’t happy with the last few terrains i made, so i have drastically re-worked it. Right now it has a lot of placeholder meshes, but already it feels a much better.
I did a simple camera fly-through using Matinee which you can see below. I also made some mountains using Worldmachine and Zbrush and threw them in to see how they would look, and made a dirt/ground texture in the spare time i had.
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With the snow, is that done by materials figuring out which part points up or did you texture it in? I only ask because I was just wondering how to do it in materials earlier :eek:
Should be very useful 
Looks nice!
Suppose that means more sculpting for tomorrow…