Lighting and Skydome Progress

     Lately, I've worked more on the tea mesh, the lighting, and the sky dome. My goal is to make it feel like a cloudy early morning. I think it's getting a bit closer, but I still want to layer in more clouds in the sky dome. In addition, I'm planning to add some flow maps and panning noise textures for animation.

    Next, I'm going to work on the cloud cards that are placed in the level. I think they're too translucent right now, and I want to give them more of a sense of volume. Another thing that I want to do is make the ground less flat looking. If I make a ground cover mesh and perhaps add tessellation and more roughness variations to the terrain materials, that should help give it more depth. Overall, I think those will be some good goals to work on next. Afterwards, I can continue refining the tea mesh and sky dome.

Progress on Landscape Materials

        Over the last couple of weeks, I worked on landscape materials. I thought this project would be a great opportunity to get more practice with Substance Designer. Following the "Forest Ground" tutorial by Get Learnt w/ Chunk, I made a ground generator to create three main material variants.

        I also followed a tutorial by Bohdan Bilous to create a terrain generator. Right now, I'm only using the color as a macro texture for the landscape material. I'm planning to use it for the background mountains later on too. Basically, I just blended between the close texture and the macro texture based on the distance between the material world position and the camera.

        Next, I will add more variations to the ground materials and work on a custom cloud mask for the sky. Additionally, I'm going to revisit the tea plants too. I think they could use a bit more dimension and negative space to them, so I'm going to see if I can add more cards and rely less heavily on the filler mesh that I'm using in the center of the plant.

Block Out Part 2

        Here's an update on the block out. I added some clouds, edited the lighting a bit, and painted some basic colors on the landscape.

        Next, I'm going to block out a few more areas along the main road and start on some of the landscape materials.
 

Tea Garden Block Out

        I'm taking a break from the Bigfoot project to work on something with a smaller scope. My plan is to make an environment inspired by the tea gardens in Darjeeling.

        So far I've made some hills and placed some tea plants throughout the scene. I also made a blueprint to scatter the plants along a spline.

        In terms of assets, I want to limit the scene to the tea plants, ground materials, and some background trees and mountains. Next I'll block out the background elements to fill in the rest of the scene.

More Updates

        I worked more on the badger burrow area and some general lighting and material updates. In front of the badger burrow, I added some blood decals. Hopefully that draws more attention to it and makes it seem more dangerous. 

 

        Aside from that, I started to mask material layers for the background terrain. I used some basic tiling materials for now. My plan is to bake a new texture from some of my foliage meshes to make the distant mountains look more like they're covered in trees.

        Another thing I've been working on is a balsam fir tree. So far I have one normal variation and a more windswept version. Next I'm going to make a web covered version that's infested with gypsy moth larvae. Hopefully I can add the webs in Speedtree. That would allow them to react with the wind consistently with the rest of the tree.

 

 

        My next priorities are importing the trees, placing them throughout the level, and baking some textures for the mountains. I think that will help fill in a lot of empty space and get it to feel more like a forested mountain top.

 

 

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.