Striving for Photorealism in UE4

Thank you :slight_smile: I really do appreciate that! The idea of having realtime scenes that look almost as good as offline rendered stuff really excites me, which is why I have been pursuing it ever since seeing Koola’s work! Really have to give so much thanks to Epic who provide these awesome tools which are capable of so much! Haven’t had this much fun ever before!

Looking nice, although it’d be great if you could post higher resolution pictures. Eg the last few are very smaller, hard to make out any details in them!

Hey! Any new progress with this? it’s been a while since you’ve posted anything. :slight_smile:

And i’m still waiting on that grass tutorial :stuck_out_tongue:

Same here:)

Looks awesome, great work :slight_smile:

Yes! I’ve been spending most of my time recently learning GrowFX, really trying to properly create convincing foliage for UE4. Here are some quick work in progress shots- nowhere near the kind of quality I want to eventually achieve which is why I haven’t been posting much recently. I am slowly creating different types of foliage assets (trees/plants/ground cover) and will be putting together many test scenes as I work! More on this soon!

https://cdnb3.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/003/005/787/small/eoin-o-broin-screenshot00049.jpg?1468398607

https://cdna2.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/003/005/802/small/eoin-o-broin-screenshot00084.jpg?1468398839

I am still making a tutorial, but I wanted to do it right, with good optimized examples instead of the very expensive initial shader I wrote! The tutorial will go further than just grass, and will include a lot of things that I have learned along the way. Not sure if a free example scene would be more preferable to a tutorial, as it’s nice to be able to pick apart a scene and learn from it!

Wonderfull wroks, i’m wondering how bad could be the performance impact on real-time interaction :slight_smile:

This is looking really beautiful… well done :slight_smile:

Awesome clarity in your work! Some of the best nature scenes we’ve seen using UE4. Your lighting is superb.

Personally I’d prefer an example scene to pick apart (doesn’t have to be free). You could also put in on Gumroad or the Marketplace.

fantastic work so far !
please put your foilage work on gumroad or on the marketplace for us all to enjoy :wink:

Working hard to improve my scenes, here is a new one textured with Megascans and using GrowFX for the foliage.

https://cdna2.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/003/199/134/medium/eoin-o-broin-screenshot00046.jpg?1470945834

Seriously good. By the way are you using Speedtree plants? If so how do you achieve this nice roughness/spec look on them, whenever i set specularity it bleeds specular effect trough the plant and roughness is just being ignored while ST is used in UE4.
On additional note…are you beta tester for Megascans? Havent seen it being released yet.

Looks awesome, but how did you get access to Megascans, and
are your framerates still good with all that detail?

Pretty sure Megascans hasnt been released yet, otherwise the forums would be talking about it, so how did you get access to it?

Thanks! Nope I used GrowFX to create all of the foliage. The leaves are displaced planar cards that use Megascans leaf atlases. And yes, sort of- I was fortunate to be given access to it early to make some scenes with the assets! :slight_smile:

I went a little far with the detail without caring for performance with the forest scene, but today I optimized it and got it running at 50-60FPS at 4K resolution. With proper LOD setup, billboard distant trees, and shorter directional light shadowing (this was the performance hit), you could easily hit 90 FPS @4K. Runs at a solid 75+FPS at 1440p.

Did some minor tweaks and made some shots in motion with Sequencer :slight_smile:

https://cdna2.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/003/203/398/small/eoin-o-broin-screenshot00065.jpg?1471006308

Foreground looks great, but the unrealistic background foliage(those are bushes, right?) kinda ruins it.

looking really really good !
stucki

Looks great!

I think the shadows look too dark (mostly below the ferns looks absolutely black). Maybe try LPVs ?
And the other thing is that those background bushes don’t read well. They are making it very noisy. I think the scene looks better without them.

Waiting to see the scene finished! :slight_smile: