Creating a Series Pt 4 - Steady Progress

Making Of / 04 December 2018

HELLO!

So December have just started which means I've also started my december Environment Art Mentorship and it's definitely exciting and I'm already super proud of my mentee already. :) 


As for the project , my twin brother Alexander helped me out with logo-design for my art-project.

And I'm quite happy with the direction the logo is going. It'll be well suited for what I'm planning later as well.


I've been making some progress, this week I've spent optimizing all of my current imported assets using the custom-lod workflow for the Grass & Flowers and UE4 Built-In Mesh Optimization Tools for the rest. Having worked professionally with Simplygon before I can easily say that the built-in tools are just as good as Simplygon if not better, which is very impressive in general. 


TERRAIN DEVELOPMENT

I also tried to make my terrain material automatically paint itself in the material. I need to make it more advanced since it only paints grass + cliff right now. I probably want to extend it further or even try and figure out how I make sure I get get varied regions in as well.

Here is a video of it


Later on I will probably try and tie some of my vegetation/props to the terrain layers so I get automatic grass placement etc.


OVERALL DEVELOPMENT

The main work going into the development right now is about consistency and getting the systems up and running. Everything I feel is important before I actually sit down and start designing making a specific locations that actually looks good. 

I started researching more about dynamic lighting for the art-style I'm going for and I decided that I should look more towards what's available to do with distance fields. Mesh Distance fields are a 3D volumetric texture (field) that surrounds the mesh that stores the distance from the mesh surface.

It can be used for a bunch of different things and I'm currently using it for:

  • Distance Field AO
  • Distance Field Raytraced-Shadows
  • Distance Field Dynamic Foam on my water.

and I'm looking into more ways of using them in the future.

DISTANCE FIELD AO

DISTANCE FIELD RAYTRACED SHADOWS

I've been looking at ways to optimize my world a little bit and since cascaded shadows are quite expensive at a distance as well I thought I'd move over to using Distance Field Raytraced Shadows for the far-distance shadows. Since I already have Distance Fields in, I might as well take advantage of them.

The negatives with Distance Field Ray-Traced Shadows is that they're static, they won't animate with the leaves move etc. So right now I'm using cascade shadow maps for the close-distance shadows and the DF Raytraced ones for the far distance. The quality is worse but from a distance you can't really tell anyway. 


OVERALL LOOK

Since I'm working with an actual open world with unique locations/biomes I will have to design I'm currently doing all the prepping I can to make sure everything is working smoothly. I've got a day/night cycle in the game right now as well & I try to see if I can make a consistent look.

Day & Night


Quick panning shot


CLIFF & ROCK SHADING

So I've implemented a quick cliff & rock shader that uses a surface material that scales with the scale of the object itself but also a world-aligned normal map/albedo so that I can use to get erosion lines along the cliffs / rocks if I want too.


NEXT STEPS

The next steps might be more interesting I guess, I'll single out a new location where I will start the actual portfolio piece.

  • Moving forward I'm going to have to look at trees, for real.
  • Deciding on a concept & locations for the new area
  • It's basically going to be my next portfolio piece so there is some serious work that needs to go into it as well
  • Everything from making more vegetation to making more interesting architecture
  • Figure out how to deal with more contrast in the scene without making everything too dark
  • It's still meant to be an actual game environment, complete darkness won't really be an option.


Until next time!

Warping out!

/ChrisRadsby