HEY THERE!

So people have been wondering about my next project, it's already been started. It actually started 6 years ago when I first made my Animé-inspired piece in Unreal Development Kit. I had gotten hired by Ubisoft Massive and a couple of years later I decided to try and do a stylized environment art piece and it resulted in this. At the time I was heavily inspired by Airborne & Wind Waker HD and I guess even today I still am very inspired by those games.

In reality I have spent about a weeks worth of evenings on this new project setting it up

Right after I finished up Beyond Human, I started researching and gathering material to create another more stylized piece back to the roots of what I enjoyed doing before and then BAM, Helder Pinto shows his Europa-game and it blew  my mind. It's the single-most beautiful game environment I've seen and it reminded me so much why I wanted to make more animé-inspired art.

My main influences:

• Anime
  • Ghibli
    • Europa by Helder Pinto (for the seriously awesome transformation of Ghibli Art into video-game art)
  • Naruto
  • Hunter X Hunter
• Video Games
  • Zelda : Ocarina of Time
    • Probably the most influential game that made me want to get into games.
  • Zelda : Wind Waker
  • Zelda : Breath of The Wild
  • Rime
  • Firewatch
  • ICO / Shadow of the Colossus
  • Ni No Kuni : Wrath of the White Witch

There is a trend here to the kind of games I really enjoy =P , but yes, these are my main inspirations for the next few months to come.

NAMING THE PROJECT

Legacy is the project-name for my art-series, it describes a game / world in which the player wanders finding artifacts and legacies from times past.

DEVELOPING EVEN MORE STYLIZED ART?

Well seeing that Helder, has already managed to succesfully re-create Ghibli, I've been analyzing his art a lot and I've been trying to replicate his style in UE4 (I'm sorry buddy :( , but it's just too good, I need to learn your secrets).

So my task right now is to use most of the previous tech that I've used and implement a lot of it in this new Unreal Project but also piece-by-piece trying to figure out how to acquire a look that is either spot-on or similar to Europa & Rime.

LEARNING NEW THINGS

So, I still believe I don't have the full toolbox of skills to be able to achieve everything I want. One one hand I'm trying to achieve a new cleaner style and secondly I need to spend more time learning stylized sculpting in Zbrush. So at the same time as I'm doing this in Unreal Engine , I'm also spending time reading / watching / doing tutorials. So you might see some of that here as well.

GETTING STARTED

The long lonely road...

The NR 1 thing I usually do when starting a project is Reference, which I've done and then I'm trying to lay down the ground-work for the whole project, as I stated in my previous post . For me that means, getting all the basic tech in that I want for the scene.

• Time of Day Solution
• Cloud System
• Dynamic Lighting
  • After my recent endevour with LightMaps again for the interior scene I made, I just..want to make art, dynamic lighting helps with that.
• Global Illumination Solution
  • Ended up looking mostly at Light Propagation Volumes, though Nvidia Voxel GI looks interesting I'm not sure I can be bothered to make my own build to get it going.

etc

CLOUD SYSTEM

I wanted a decent cloud-system this time around so I went shopping around the Marketplace and found
Cloudscape Seasons which I've had great-success with so far, and Nilson Lima has been a great help and support for just setting my stuff up 10/10 service. I'll see how far I can get with this or if I need to change later but for now it gives me really nice fluffy raymarched volumetric clouds.

GRADIENT MAPPING

Color Ramps & Gradient Mapping  has been around for quite some time though I've never really been using it for much. My main thinking for using it in my project is that I want to be more flexible with the colors I use.  I want to:

• Create Palettes of Colors that I use for everything
  • Grass has one palette, Rocks has one etc etc and each could be tweaked or swapped in other regions of the world
• Be versatile
  • I don't want to have to push out a specific albedo map out of Substance Painter / Designer every time I want to try new colors
• Removing Noise
  • One of my visual main pillars are about removing noise, in the environment, limiting the amount of colors any asset can have will help with this overall goal I believe but also help consistency.
    
    

GRASS SHADING

The initial implementation of my grass just to use a solid color that I multiplied with a linear gradient, it looked really nice in its simple state. Overall I quite liked the look of it and I was happy with it until I realized it didn't look painterly enough, just samey.

 So after looking at lots of Ghibli references I realized that I need to focus more on the bigger picture  and larger clumps than individual straws of grass.

Now the easiest most obvious solution to getting this type of Shading I realized was to make sure the grass 100% picked up the color from the terrain material. If the terrian material is nice and varied the grass will pick up the colors and be shaded the same way, which gives a nice painterly feel to all the grass.

What's the best thing about this ? It reduces noise but also add more detail to the environment in a good way. The clumps of grass that is colored ends up being in front of another shade of grass which really gives that painterly feel to all the grass.

Another positive about this is that the grass perfectly blends with the distant terrain and it minimizes popping by a lot. It's a lot easier to optimize the grass and make it LOD-away quickly if it already perfectly blends with the terrain underneath.

FLOWERS, WATER & TREES

So I decided to add the water I made for the Beyond Human project though I've stripped out the tessellation since I'm not sure I want to use it since tessellation is generally a real performance hog and I'd like to figure another way making the water generally nicer in the environment. I might want to go back to tessellated water later on but for now just a water-plane will do I think.

I also decided to make some flowers to see if I could get a similar result, I also tried making a quick tree which is still better than I've done before even though its quick. I need to spend more time actually developing the look for some of the trees.

SO CHRIS WHY ARE YOU DOING THE EXACT SAME THING AS HELDER EH!?

"Imitation is the highest form of flattery"

Well actually, I'm using what he's currently shown as a benchmark of trying to find the same / similar style myself. It's the Ghibli style we want to achieve as well and Europa is the closest piece of art I've found to it. If I nail the arstyle then I can at least move on to my own custom areas. 

 That's the whole point of it! 

Either way I gotta thank Helder for Europas existence, it's inspired me to no end :)

SO WHAT'S NEXT?

Well, the next step is to basically start developing my own areas and compositions.  That said however I still have to implement proper landscape materials, make nicer trees (current is a 5 min hackjob), have a try at making rocks & figure out shading of buildings and what not.

So in the future you'll end up seeing some more original stuff from me.

Warping Out!

/Chris Radsby