Lighting Changes and Material Layering

        Recently, I've worked more on the lighting and materials. I updated the project to 4.26 and brought in the latest version of Ultra Dynamic Sky. It uses Unreal's new atmosphere sky features and has some really nice volumetric clouds. After tweaking the settings, I think I got close to the clear night sky look that I was going for.

        My idea was to keep the overall ambient lighting fairly dark and selectively highlight important areas with brighter ambient spotlights.

Ambient spotlights around the badger burrow.

        Aside from lighting, I also experimented with the new layered material system. With layered materials, you can reuse the same materials on multiple assets and blend them with lower resolution mask textures. This should help me save memory, get higher texel density, and texture assets faster. So far, I tried it out on the badger burrow and one of the rock meshes. 

Granite material layers and parameters.

        Next I'm going to add some badger tracks in front of the burrow. I want to make that area stand out so the player can know it's hazardous to walk there. Aside from the tracks, I might need to add something like bones to make it seem more dangerous. I'm also going to add the layered materials to more of the level assets. After that, I'll focus on one of the other main areas. I'm definitely looking forward to applying these new features throughout the rest of the level.

Foliage Progress

        I've been working on the goldenrod flower asset recently. I think I have something that will work fairly well for now. In the future, I may want to add some more variation to the textures. I'm going to keep it like this for now so I can continue on other parts of the level.

 

        To make the textures, I ended up making a generator for the leaves in Substance Designer. Hopefully I can reuse it on other foliage in the future too.

Leaf materials generated in Substance Designer.

Leaf generator graph.

        For the flowers, I created two high poly models that I baked to clusters along with the leaves in SpeedTree.

High poly flowers.

 

Clusters generated in SpeedTree.

        I also tested it out in the level.

 

        I think it helps draw some more attention to the badger burrow. Currently, I think it would help to have at least one more plant type to break up the repetition of the grass meshes. Before I do that, I'm going to work on the lighting some more. The shadows seem a bit too dark right now. I found a couple of reference images to follow.

"In countless numbers" by sagesolar CC BY 2.0

"Moon Rising Over Moss Lake" by John Brighenti CC BY 2.0

        I want to generally get the look of a clear night sky with lots of stars. Hopefully I can find a reasonable balance between the dark night lighting and a certain amount of ambient light so you can still see things.

Proportion Changes and Foliage Research

        Recently, I've been working on some modeling and research. I started by making a quick block out of the badger.

        When I placed it in the level at first, I realized that the burrow was way too large. I scaled it down quite a bit to match the badger.

        Next I want to focus more on the surrounding foliage to help draw the eye to the badger burrow. I did some research on biomes in the area and decided to base this environment on an Alpine Krummholz ecological community.

        An Alpine Krummholz occurs in high elevation areas at around 3500 feet. Trees are often bent, twisted, and stunted due to strong winds and snow. I think having these abnormally shaped trees will help this feel like a mystical and somewhat alien environment that you could expect to find strange creatures in. 

"Prevailing wind" by John Spooner CC BY-NC 2.0

        First, I'm going to model some flowers for the meadow around the badger burrow. I'll start with a large-leaved goldenrod. It's a fairly tall plant with bright yellow flowers. I think the bright flowers could help draw attention to the burrow.

 

"Solidago macrophylla 5" by Nadiatalent CC BY-SA 4.0

        Currently, I think I'll have separate cards for the large leaves and flowers. Some clusters of smaller leaves and flowers could probably be combined into single cards. I drew some red outlines over the reference to plan how I'll break it up into cards.

This image, "Card Plan", is a derivative of "Solidago macrophylla 5" by Nadiatalent, used under CC BY-SA 4.0 "Card Plan" is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 by Dylan Collins.

 

        I think this will be a good first experiment to figure out an approach for the foliage. I want to try starting with a photo reference for the leaf and sculpting the macro details for it. That can be baked into a normal map and used for the card and for generating clusters. I found a few tutorials detailing this method that I'm going to reference. One is Jobye Karmaker's talk "Digital Dragons 2019 Talk Video - Approaching Modular Vegetation in Games." The other is Peyton Varney's "Protégé Foliage Tutorial."

        Both tutorials involve sculpting macro leaf details. One main difference is Jobye's uses photo sources while Peyton's uses Substance Designer to generate the base color. I think I'm going to try both. I'll probably stick with photos for this plant. I found some fairly high resolution ones that I can use. In the future, I'll probably try Substance on any plants that I can't find good photos for.

        Aside from trying these new techniques, I also want to set up the foliage to react with Bigfoot when he walks through it. My initial thought is using pivot painter along with a material parameter collection for his location in world space. There's going to be a lot of foliage in the level for Bigfoot to walk through. It would be great to set up some standardized way of handling it so all the foliage can have this behavior.

        I'm excited to try out these new foliage techniques. Hopefully I can reach a decent quality level and get a unique look to the environment. Once I finish this first flower model, I'd like to apply the same process to any future foliage and maybe find ways to streamline it.

Badger Cave Update

        I did a quick paint over of the badger cave to think of ways to make it stand out more.

        After reading a bit about badgers, I found that they prefer open grassland areas. They also live in burrows rather than caves. I think if I make this more of an open meadow area, the badger burrow could stand out more. 

"Badger hole" by Carol Rose CC BY-SA 2.0

 

 

        I also found that badgers tend to form mounds in front of their burrows from excavating. If I have a big mound in front of the badger burrow entrance, that could help draw more attention to it. Additionally it can help mark the area that's dangerous to walk on.

"Spoil heaps at badger sett" by Hildesvini CC0 1.0

        I started implementing some of these ideas in the level.

        Next I'm going to model a simplified silhouette of the badger. I think that will help convey a better sense of scale. Another thing I want to do is make the grass brighter green. That will help it contrast better with the soil mound. I'm thinking about making some custom grass too. This level takes place in the Adirondack Mountains. I think it would be cool to get some specific vegetation that grows in the area. Hopefully I can get the cave popping out more after I implement these things.

Bigfoot Game Update

        I'm going to start posting some updates for the Bigfoot game that I've been working on with my friend Eli. Our basic concept is that this is a stealth game where you play as bigfoot. You need to avoid detection and sometimes scare away people to complete missions for men in black entities. The men in black claim that they will help you find your missing parents if you work for them, but should they be trusted? 

We're working on the tutorial level right now. It's playable, but there are still a lot of bugs and confusing things to fix. Here are a few images of the level so far.

        The level starts in Bigfoot's cave. This is his bedroom.

        These are some images of his kitchen and living room area. I might need a little more ambient light in here. I'll tweak the lighting a bit more in the future.

        Here's Bigfoot's art studio area.

        These are some shots of the cave moving towards the entrance.

        This is near the cave entrance where Bigfoot's gnome friend lives. He loves these glowing mushrooms. In the mission, a hiker has gotten into his mushroom patch and he wants Bigfoot to scare the hiker away. I'm going to add some kind of tarp or hanging moss over the rock pile entrance to cover the interior. Eli's going to work on the gnome so we're using a small mannequin as a placeholder for now.

        The cave entrance is behind a waterfall. I think I need to work on the water texture mask a bit and also add some smaller water drop particles.

        Here are some images of the exterior outside the cave entrance. The trees are covered in webs due to a gypsy moth infestation. I'm probably going to revisit the web material. I'm not sure if it's reading well enough yet. I also want to add some gypsy moth larvae in the webs. I might get rid of or reduce the fireflies in the webs because they probably aren't reading too well either. 

        Another important thing is making the beehive on the tree stand out more. I'm thinking I could make it brighter, give it a more interesting shape, and have a bunch of bees swarming around it. The beehive really needs to stand out, because the bees can attack you if you get too close.

        This is the badger cave. The badger attacks you if you get too close, so you need to sneak around it. I need to think of some way to draw more attention to the badger cave so players won't accidentally run into it. Maybe I can get some moonlight hitting it. I could also try adding some fireflies by it. That might make it too noisy though. I'm going to prioritize trying some different things here. It's an area that causes some confusion while playtesting. 

        This is where you learn how to jump over the gap by the waterfall and how to do a two handed lift with the log farther down the path. This area is mostly still block out and will need more set dressing.

        In this area, you learn how to use the fairy ring. After eating a mushroom, you can enter a fairy ring and use a special ability. In this case, you can use a phase ability to go through the rocks covering this cave entrance.

        Finally, here's the cave with the mushroom patch and the intruding hiker. This area was hard to see in while playtesting, so I'm going to make it brighter. I'm going to do a general set dressing pass soon and work on a mesh for the stalagmites and stalactites.

 I'm going to mainly work on things affecting gameplay next, such as:

-Making the beehive stand out.

-Drawing attention to the badger cave.

-Adding some more tutorial button prompts for using items

-Investigating a crouching bug.

-Making the cave brighter.

I'll post some more quick updates as I address these issues.