Striving for Photorealism in UE4

Thank you- really means a lot! Love all the work you are doing, always checking in to see how it is going!

Interior scenes like this are baked, so it can hit 120FPS easily- the outdoor ones use dynamic lighting so it is much harder to get the same performance.


I’ve been deep into landscape creation lately, lots of learning and trial and error. Here is a quick test landscape I made today:

https://cdnb3.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/003/834/155/small/eoin-o-broin-screenshot00040.jpg?1477783588

https://cdnb3.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/003/834/187/small/eoin-o-broin-test.jpg?1477783889

Very nice.

You should do a timelapse/speed design video of one of your environments.

That would be awesome to see!

Keep it up!

Did you use World Machine or World Creator to make these landscapes?

These pics are awesome dude can you work with us? :smiley:

Oh man ! Makes some tuts about that! Your are look so great ! :wink: Keep going !

Eoin, can you contact me please? javieralbcarcom

Been doing a lot of work on creating realtime foliage with GrowFX and Megascans textures, results are starting to look promising! Going to take some time to make new scenes over Christmas!

https://cdna2.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/004/271/602/medium/eoin-o-broin-ton2.jpg?1481890512

https://cdnb1.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/004/271/605/medium/eoin-o-broin-tone.jpg?1481890541

Are these photos or screenshots from engine ? ;o

That meme is adequately large. This almost feels like a hoax.

I feel like it should have been the “I don’t believe you” meme from Anchorman. That photo is redonk.

Hi!

As the majority of people already said, your work is really amazing. I’m still very impressed by your fuzzy grass - can you give us more detail about it, since i guess, you don’t have that much time for a tutorial?

  • How did you’ve build up the geometry for the grass? are those single blades with cards as LOD’s?
    -> If you did just used cards, did you managed to get this fine detail on each blade via supersampling?
  • Is the grass-geometry casting shadows or did you manage to get some “depth” via shader?
  • Did you’ve “injected” some of the landscape color into the grass?
  • Did you altered the vertex normals on the blades/cards to go “straight up”?
  • It may sound stupid, bud did you even used SSS (two sided foliage)?
    -> If yes, do you’ve used a mask for it?
  • How many variations of grass did you used for the screenshots?

Your work is really good and shows the capabilities of the engine to some great extend, especially your last posted screenshots.
Really inspiring and forward-thinking!

Hi, great work, mate. Can you share what resolution size you use for your textures? 4k, 8k? I am guessing since it’s photorealism you use really high res textures for foilage, walls and ground?

i dont mean to swear holy **** this is good what kind of hardware you running ?

Where’d you go Eoin? I want to see more of this awesomeness!

Thanks for the kind words! Here are a few new screenshots- have been working on a foliage pipeline using Megascans for the last few months, can finally give out details about it soon!

Thank you! The fuzzy grass I posted before is using a bit of a hacky method to look nice since it uses translucency to get the soft look. Not only is translucency more expensive to render, but it causes sorting issues, so I’d avoid it overall. My new grass tests are using the standard masked shader and while it doesn’t have the soft look, it certainly performs better and is more lifelike in terms of shading.

  • Geometry for the grass: the old translucent grass was just a bunch of scattered planes with multiple blades on them, but now I use a single blade per card approach with LODs.

  • The translucent grass geometry isn’t casting shadows, purely relying on SSAO for depth. (again the new grass I’ve been working on does cast shadows and it gives a more accurate looking result, especially when combined with contact shadows).

  • Yep, I often inject landscape color into the grass by simply having the same world space tint in the landscape and grass shader- this allows the blend between grass and the landscape to match up a bit better, especially at distance (reduces obvious pop in).

  • Yes, definitely used SSS (the old translucent grass just used the albedo maps for that, but with my new grass, Megascans comes with translucency maps which work really great).

  • The old translucent grass only had one mesh variation (it was a super early and primitive test). The new ones have 3 variations per species.

Generally 4K for foliage/surfaces but it can easily scale down to 2K and 1K and not lose much impact!

Thank you! Running a 4K monitor with a GTX 1080!

Haven’t gone anywhere :wink: Have just been busy working on a foliage pipeline vs creating new scenes! Back to scene work soon! Always keeping up to date with the engine and the awesome stuff on the forums.

This just looks insane! :smiley:

Really can’t tell the difference anymore whether it’s a photo or not…

This is just redonkulus… lighting, materials and geometry are spot on!!
Thanks for supplying the community with so much information and breakdown images by the way, this really helps a lot

@

thank you very much for your answers!
Really appreciate it.

Btw. your new screenshots are insane. Do you use VXGI?

Think you finally got vegetation right with your latest, awesome work!