Based on the results of last week’s tests, I decided to avoid using water bodies and instead incorporated foliage into the scene to produce captivating shadows. To create a smooth blend of textures and give the impression of a meadow area, I utilized RVT and virtual textures to make modifications to the blueprints.
General Settings:
Enable virtual textures support: Editor Preferences>Procedural Foliage.
I used Foliage Mode in Unreal Engine to create the foliage and painted the Quixel assets over the map. While sculpting the landscape, I realized that there were multiple interesting looking areas. As a result, I decided to expand my renders to three to showcase an additional outside area with less foliage and a simpler composition. To decide which foliage to use, I tested plants that matched my moodboards at the Test Level. Then, I grouped them depending on which ones looked good together and planted them around the scene. It is worth noting that I had Random Yaw turned on in the individual foliage settings.
Structure:
Open plains: Bushy Starwort, Common everlasting, Green herb, Mustard Yellow flower.
Forest: Cotton grass, Wood sorrel, Sea thrift, Common Coleus, Purple shamrock, Wood sorrel, Yellow archangel.
Rocks: Lingonberry, Sea Campion.
I arranged foliage and trees to make the scene visually appealing, then experimented with the wind by adjusting the texture of the plant’s material. However, I am uncertain about the outcome because it looks too artificial. Despite tweaking the settings, even a slight breeze creates noticeable changes. This could be because the Niagara settings are too large for the small landscape, requiring significant adjustments.
Ninety Days
General Inspiration: To improve my understanding of Unreal Engine Scenes, I chose to conduct further research. I was facing some difficulty with the environment and thus, I selected ‘Ninety Days’ as my primary source of inspiration.
- Why ‘Ninety Days’ in Unreal Engine 5 as an inspiration?
The project overview covers how Megascans artists tackle lighting in the scenes, work with new modelling tools without creating assets from scratch in Maya, and add interest with sequence animations.
The Ninety Days in Unreal Engine 5 project kicked off with just three core artists and a simple concept: make something beautiful and inspiring, keep it real-time, and if possible, build each environment in just three days.
Quixel (2022)
I found all the artwork inspiring in terms of lighting and composition. None of it was made using concept art but rather creating the scene as you go in the Engine. I was surprised by how easy using UE5 in this way was. The small team of artists was able to create multiple various environments in just three days. Each one of 42 distinctively different sceneries was created by a different artist.
‘Ninety Days’ also tested the Lumen engine and the flexibility of UE5 which was helpful for me since I am not creating a game or full-scale project in Unreal. Lumen, UE5’s fully dynamic global illumination system, provided an incredible amount of freedom to visualize scenes where indirect lighting adapts on the fly, naturally lightening your landscape and creating incredible realism. Artists using it also focused on short cinematic scenes and tips and tricks to use in UE5 which can be very helpful in future projects. By using the Nanite setting of high-quality assets from the Megascans library artists (and me) were able to focus on creating the best asset possible, without worrying about polygons count.
Bibliography:
Game Dev Academy (2022) QUICK TRICK to Realistically BLEND ASSETS with LANDSCAPE. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATfzfvtvfIo (Accessed: 31 May 2023).
Quixel (2022) Ninety Days in Unreal Engine 5. Available at: https://quixel.com/blog/2022/5/12/ninety-days-in-unreal-engine-5 (Accessed: 12 May 2023).
Unreal Engine (2023) Procedural Foliage Tool. Available at: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.2/en-US/procedural-foliage-tool-in-unreal-engine/ (Accessed: 31 May 2023).