Striving for Photorealism in UE4

[EoinOBroin]

Wow, thanks for all the awesome comments! Much appreciated!

@iBrews;596444

I just read through this thread cover to cover and I’ve just had my mouth hanging open the entire time-- every new image was more unbelievable than the last; truly it was like reading a fantastic novel with really satisfying story reveals

And it was extra satisfying after all of that build-up to see a tutorial at the end of the thread!

Keep up the amazing work. And that’s awesome and inspiring that you didn’t go to college. Just curious-- was it something ever under consideration for you, or did you always know you were going to try to make it on your own?

Also I see that you have your own private youtube channel (subscribed!) but the tutorial was posted by quixel. Do you work for them now? Are you still keeping up with the music thing? Lastly, as I’m a big VR guy myself (also sporting a Vive and a GTX1080), I would love to hear if you’ve gotten anything to run smoothly yet. I haven’t seen anything near this quality in VR.

Thanks a lot, glad you found the thread enjoyable!

Regarding the college question- this was always (and still is) just a fun project! I think that anything creative can be learned at home with the amount of content on the internet! I’m doing some foliage work with Quixel now yep!

Regarding VR- it is very difficult to get scenes like these to run on VR as they rely on dynamic lighting, SSAO and lots of translucency- all things that heavily take away from performance. I think VR is still limited and in early stages- can’t wait to see it in the future when the hardware is there to support current high end desktop tier scenes in VR.

@vkiuru;597925

Hi !

So very impressive work and skill!

I, too, model my trees (for 3DS projects) with GrowFX, but am new to Unreal engine and thus far haven’t been able to transfer a GrowFX object animation loop to UE. Is this possible? Also if you don’t mind, any other tips you’d have about the process would be appreciated - I’m absolutely obsessed with detail in the trees and other plants so I’m trying to keep a monster of a rig up to date all the time so I won’t run in to memory or other bottlenecks and right now would love get a beginners grasp of how things should go in Unreal Engine but it’s such a frustrating process with the (at the start) complicated looking node-tentacles instead of an organized material in Max So yeah, before I get too far off the track my question was do you have a workflow you could share concerning the exporting of wind animation for trees? Thanks in advance should you find the time to answer.

Really intriguing stuff!

Thanks! Regarding the GrowFX wind, it’s something I’m currently looking into! Will be posting tests in the coming weeks!

@TorQueMoD;599651

What kind of system are you running? The latest TitanX and 64 gigs of ram?

GTX 1080- but running at 4K which is very taxing regardless. All of the scenes here can run at 60FPS @1080p on a GTX 980. Again, this is not meant to be a thread about performance- purely just to have fun with UE4 and see how far the visuals can be pushed in real-time. Creating LODs and scaling down densities is both tedious and unsatisfying, I just want to focus on the fun part for these tests which is building environments.

@elliotENGi;600012

This thread is lovely. That ice in particular looks straight up real.

What’s the poly count/patch size of your grass instances like?

Thanks! Polycounts vary, but most are on single planar cards. It’s all about the density- the biggest giveaway of game grass is that it’s super sparse and over sized. Worth going a bit denser to match real world cluster density.

@Memekin;601006

Just curious, what does it take to run your scenes, and do you make all your assets yourself?

I make everything myself but use Megascans textures for the majority of the texturing.

@moody.by.name;601643

I’ve been waiting since February to find out how you did the grass in the first scene - all your stuff looks amazing, but grass is something I always struggle with - you said it was super simple and you would think of doing a tutorial on that. Your latest tutorial is great, but pretty complex. Can you even give a short description of what I can do to get a grass material like yours? You mentioned transparency etc, but I don’t get it - is it a short mesh with material, or literally a ground material with transparency? Any help would be great!!! 7 months is a long time to keep looking at those first pictures and dreaming of a day when I can achieve this…

The way I was doing it before was fairly incorrect and caused sorting issues. I am still trying to figure out a way to balance the issues with the nice soft look and have in depth wind control. It’s a planar mesh that is painted in bulk onto the landscape. The ground material is separate.

@JBroderick;601901

Whoa, this stuff is awesome, especially considering that it runs quite fast. This and Koola’s stuff is pretty much as photorealistic as I’ve seen so far in UE4.

As a request would there be any of covering what you did with the short grass in a bit more depth at some point? Mesh setup, materials, etc.

Yes for sure! Working on it

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Working on a LOT of new things, will be posting new scenes soon! Here’s a quick WIP discarded interior scene- decided that I’ll remake this with a much greater amount of detail sometime in the future.

https://cdnb3.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/003/479/271/small/eoin-o-broin-screenshot00178.jpg?1474142355