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.