Like a lot of other people, I’m really impressed with the look of ‘The Witness’. It uses simplification of design really effectively. It also seems like a good middle ground for an indie development that can’t spend the resources creating real-world graphics.
I’m hoping someone with more experience can help analyze their approach. I’m not looking for copy the style, but understand the workflow and see what I can apply.
Should this look be achievable in UE4? It seems as thought the foliage is a simple diffuse color - but the lighting creates some really nice depth. Also, not sure if it is post-processing, but there is a real ‘softness’ to the foliage that I haven’t seen in a game before.
Any ideas as to how to approach achieving something similar?
Also, while on the subject of foliage, I love the gradiate of the grass in the first picture. Could that be achieved through lighting or a material input…or simply by changing the base color?
Few things I’d try - either slight emissive or ss. Also try to realign all the normals to a sphere and use 1 smoothing group.
That’s where I would start at least. I’d know more answers after that. I think The Witness blog might have some more direction, I remember him talking about making the trees.
Edit - I guess I was right, I searched their blog for trees and the artist mentioned the following (found in the comments):
They also mention using a transparency angle shader, I’ve built this in other engines, I don’t know offhand how to do it in UE4, but I’m sure it’s possible. You could use distance fade nodes as a hack in the meantime.
That volumetric feel is easier done on a transparent shader. Material editor has that depth fade note that would be very useful for this, but currently UE4 handles transparent materials very poorly.
