Swamp almost finished!

So as I was working towards wrapping the project I kind of realized that it was going pretty smooth so why not do more with this? Therefore I started expanding the map, essentially just using existing assets to create more houses and whatnot and to add extra polish and details.

I started adding extra shacks and modifying landscape while still maintaining connectivity to existing map. Started experimenting with some unique assets like water wheel, windmill, running river (that powers water wheel). Dynamic elements like that really brings environments to life and they tend to be rather easy to do. I mean all water wheel needs to do is spin, which is something you can do with 3 clicks in Unreal, just and Rotator component to dynamic mesh. Same with windmill, you just have to center out the pivot of whatever actor is supposed to rotate as it will rotate arround the axis of that pivot. Did same thing with gears that the water wheel spins. 

Hate the fact that SSR is so reliant on Temporal AA, as TAA isn't getting rendered in high-ress shots, therefore reflections look subpar. Might have to solve this with planar reflections and cubemaps. Tried running it in supersampled resolution but FPS drops like crazy, very hard to take screenshots when it's running at like 1-2 FPS.

But anyways, quite happy how things are turning out. Really liked the workflows in here, stayed very modular from very start while making it look as un-modular as possible, did some fine foliage which was always a challenge for me and managed to get some really cool colors going without it looking noisy as hell. Or maybe I'm wrong and it actually looks like crap but I like it nevertheless :D

Should wrap this up soon, next update should be the last.

Swamp WIP #3

Things looking good. Lots of small additions and tweaks.

Got in some extra assets like proper cloth/net, ropes and metal parts. Set up some vertex shaders to paint wetness/moss on wood and moss/wind on ropes. All painting done inside UE with paint tool. 

Also added mask on wood that enables wood to have paint layer on top of it. It uses bitmap mask for that, I got 3 of them in Photoshop with color range selection, just playing with intensities and whatnot. Idea was to use base diffuse and get correct information from it to then overlay that mask inside editor so that paint layer and diffuse underneath blend perfectly, creating convincing look. As the pain layer is just a mask, you can change it in material instance, you can choose from 3 different masks (all gray packed into single texture) and tweak other parameters like color, roughness, spec etc.

Also tried out new LoD system that came out with 4.14, it's fantastic. Basically like Simplygon but free and works within the engine. Very fast and produces great results, frankly cannot ask more from it (maybe some kind of billboard generation for things like trees, the way Speedtree does it, but that a little crazy I think).

Was a little worried that trees might look too good as they are done entirely by hand and there are issues with shading, but in the end I think results are great.

Swamp WIP #2

Some more updates: got some water in, tweaked lighting quite a bit, did bunch of extra assets.

Lighting really needed tweaking in my opinion, results that I have now are much better than before I think. Some very light color corrections happening too but nothing major.

Water is quite early on too but most of the features are in. Translucent with depth fade, picking up SSR, might try planar reflections and see how those work. There is some nice movement on the dirt on the water, quite happy about that. Strangely enough, giving water certain metalicity value (0.5 for me there) makes the water look much more, well, water-y. Not exactly sure why that’s the case ‘cause I believe every water shader I’ve seen doesn’t use metalicity in any way, but without it it just looks like plastic. Interesting.

Did some cloth, looks alright, might do some more as props and whatnot.

Still a long way to go, but it’s shaping up nicely, more updates in coming days!

Swamp WIP

Things are shaping up nicely. Got a good pipeline for making meshes so keeping things as modular as possible, using combination of unique and tillable textures. Made a simple Landscape to get basic layout down.

Still need to do the water surface and get some better lighting/PP setup.

New year brings new things

Well damn. 2016 is behind us. Hello 2017?

What's better way to start a new year other than by doing new cool stuff. This is something I've been working on for some time:

Kind of a swamp scene. Wooden buildings, all modular, some foliage like trees, grass and moss, some water flowing around (it's a swamp after all). Pretty early shot, still a long way to go but basics are down and looking fine. Was pain to get foliage looking right, especially grass. Had to dissect Epic's shader for it, still not fully understand it but hey, it looks good.

Want to make this all foggy and wet, will see how it goes, more updates soon.

Ruins and whatnot

I've been quite busy, working on bunch of different things. Overgrown Ruins are finished and up in Unreal Marketplace, here is a link:

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/overgrown-ruins

Finished another pack in the meantime too, more fancy statues. Better and generally more polished than previous pack too, imo. I was using cavity bakes for ambient occlusion in Unreal but actual ambient occlusion bakes look so much better, I don't even know why I decided to use cavity bakes for that, silly me. Slightly improved material, but still staying fairly basic. Optimized pipeline to create cloth and hair for statues as hassle free as possible, just gotta plan couple things ahead before doing actual sculpting, like making sure that there won't be any voids inside cloth folds or hair, and if those seem unavoidable there are couple of ways to deal with them too. Here are some shots of the new statues:

Quite liking how these turned out. Couple of close-ups to show off details, they really hold up well. Those AO maps really doing their job here too, they are somewhat exaggerated in post processing but hey, I'll call it artistic touch.

Unreal work

Before I started doing this project, had to think for some time how I want to approach texturing. To be honest, I consider texturing my weakest discipline therefore whenever possible I try to plan texturing out ASAP. With this project I decided to focus on making good sculpts, extract relevant data (normal maps, AO, cavities, other potential masks) and use that to blend bunch of stuff inside shader.

I’ve used this approach before and always had good results with it. I’ve been inspecting Epic’s work on Unreal Tournament and they doing fantastic job with it, lots of great things to learn from there. The approach they quite often use is the one I’m using for this project too, except that they tend to have even more masks and stuff than I do.

So here is the breakdown – I got my masks in what I call mixmap, it’s a texture with a different mask in each channel. I’m sure you’ve seen that stuff before. I got my AO in red channel, cavity in green and edge highlights in blue. Rendered AO and Normal in Xnormal, then passed the rendered normal map into Knald to get cavity and edge highlights (or concavity and convexity info). Used Knald most because it’s so much faster than rendering this stuff from high poly, even AO is pretty slow, but it’s much more accurate than from Knald. I can live with cavity/edge inaccuracies since I’ll be using them as simple masks, but I want AO to be good because I’ll plug that directly into AO slot in Unreal shader. So those are the maps so far – AO, Normal, Cavity, Edge highlights. Here is my shader noodle soup:

I reckon the screenshot itself isn’t much of a help for someone who wants to learn some stuff so I’m thinking of releasing small project with just one asset, fully textured and with the shader done. I can’t release whole project because it’s supposed to go to Unreal Marketplace but I guess one asset wouldn’t hurt things and could prove helpful to some folks.

So here is how the assets look so far, some basic lighting/PP done too:

There also is the leaking stuff. For that I’m using separate (3^rd) UV channel, basically projected from front. The leak texture is horizontally tiling, you can increase/decrease tiling amount. Since its using projected UV map that took 5 secs to make there is some unwanted, dare I say, leaking here and there. Now I was considering several ways to get rid of that and the easiest in my opinion is vertex painting. Leak texture is lerped on top of everything else based on red vertex channel. So you can go to mesh paint mode and manually mask out areas you don’t want the leaking to be at.

Will see how things will go from there, there might be some problems with this lighting/PP setup in the long run but nothing that can’t be solved.