Leaves Update

Finished hand-painting the leaves.

Here's what the diffuse map looks like for those interested.

Here's a quick view from Unreal, with nothing special in the material yet. Planning to sort that out after i've made a few clumps for me to play with.

Going to make some LODs now and create some clumps of leaves to use throughout the scene so i have a nice few variations and i'll be able to make a few instances of the material to create different effects such as more desaturated types of leaves that look a bit more weathered.

Leaves

Started painting some leaves yesterday, happy with how they're turning out so far.

New project

Alright so here we are again, It's been a while unfortunately because I've had a few rough months.

So let's start.

This time, I've decided to create a outdoor foliage environment based upon a 18th century painting Rain in an Oak Forest by Ivan Shishkin.

Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Shishkin

I have chosen the painting in particular to recreate as I find It very compelling and I get a great sense of mood and I particularly like the colours and style.

The attention to detail is great, It will be very useful in creating this environment, I've been waiting a while for the chance to jump on this but haven't really figured out how I was going to approach it. I wanted to make it in my own way and have my own art-style with the addition of adding influence of the painting.
A lot of foliage environments go for a realistic look, which is awesome and sometimes a long process, but if i could replicate this painting (even a little) into a 3D environment format whilst somewhat keeping true to the original artwork, I think it would be so cool.

With the rise of photogrammetry replicating realistic outdoor foliage and objects it is becoming increasingly easier, admittedly there's still a lot of legwork and limitations when using these techniques, but with tools such as Megascans that recently was released publicly, in which has a library full of content, it wouldn't take long to flesh out a environment, of course this would be too realistic as well as Quixels content and not my own.

The reason I mention photogrammetry, is i'll most likely look at assets from the KiteDemo in UE4 and do some reverse engineering on the terms of learning how they made these assets; what i could learn from materials that were created and look at geometry density when creating my own.

This is where I'm standing on this, I could say, I make this environment from scratch the difficult way. I could take existing elements from libraries and modify them, or I could literally just build and environment out of preexisting models.

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I need to say, what's the goal here? What am I trying to achieve?

I think I can answer this after taking some consideration.

Firstly, It's something different.. It's quite clear to me that there's fairly few attempts like this out there (to my knowledge) anything like this idea, I am aware however there are artists who have tried to replicate a "painted look" through the use of shaders & post-processing however I can imagine this is highly impactful on the performance and isn't really what I'm looking to achieve, also they're not taking an original piece of artwork and converting the look or trying to replicate it. If I could achieve this, it would truly be amazing and stand out, I'd like to think of it as a 3d environment in the style of the painting, so I'm thinking outright it has to be done with hand drawn textures. Which is good may I add, I've not done fully hand-drawn textures in the past and I'm more than well equipped to tackle this head on, so this is pretty exciting territory for me.


Secondly, It's a challenge.

I've personally tried something like this before at University, but I was hugely too ambitious, my goal was to take a 2d painting and turn it into 3d...simple? It might of simple if the painting hadn't of included a character, and very little information on the environment surrounding this character. It was an extremely poor choice of mine I was very naive... I did do well on the environment and so-so on the character which was my first time by the way, but never really captured the artistic style of the painting I took the original idea from. So this kind of defeated the point... but again I was putting way too much on my shoulders for the time span. At least it gave me the experience for future projects.

 At the end of the day, life lessons are about failing and coming back stronger and perusing what you intended to do in the first place. I'm back now and I'm going to do it properly this time.

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So where does this lead me now?

The approach. I'm not going to use photogrammetry, I feel very strongly that this needs to come simply as a piece of artwork and not a recreation of reality. Right okay, so what? I think for me I'm going to just model and mainly sculpt everything, because when you break it down the real work lies in the texturing. Modelling I think will be the easy part, we're literally talking a few rocks, trees, flowers, sticks bushes and grass... Creating the look will be most difficult.

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Where I'm going to start.

From the ground up...

I'm going to try and recreate the tree stump from the bottom left of the painting, I think it's best to break down elements and tackle them individually, starting small.. As you can see there's not an awful lot to this object, If you look at the right edge it's actually surprisingly smooth, I'll stick to that.

Artists trying similar ideas.

https://80.lv/articles/treating-ue4-scene-like-a-painting/

Final

Just taking some final screenshots, oh and i added blood.

As a final thing I want to re-highlight the importance of a focus point, Originally i wanted to achieve this via using the lighting as a sense of direction, of where to go and possibly investigate. The lights are a very good way to do this but can't always work. I found that if i made the scene much darker i'd be getting too harsh of a contrast and lots of black, which is not realistic in most situations.  So the blood was to give the player a choice: Do i follow the unlit path? Or do you go to Deck B where things aren't looking to great.

Overall I'm fairly happy with this scene, I do believe there's more that can be done but I don't want to come over attached to this.

Quixel has been awesome for this scene, I had some issues very early on however It became a very consistent.

Unlit scene demonstrating the importance of light.

I'll be posting on my website, Polycount, Artsation and most social media in the next few days once I've added banners and optimization to my favourites. 

If you've been following this space, thanks for riding along and hopefully I'll see you on the next project. - Charlie

Update, About there

Coming to the last moments of this environment now, I've learned alot and i'm ready for my next project.

Underneath lighting/ Lighting update 02

Lighting is about done, in this image only detailed lighting is enabled. The underfloor lighting gives a lot more depth to the scene and gives a sense of placement that you're surrounded by floors above and below you.

Textures are done, however one more model is going to be implemented tomorrow which should finalise the scene.

Lighting/Feel Update

Still a few touches with the materials on some parts. But fairly happy with progress made, i'll have a few more emissive maps to add on some of the walls and ceiling which will add more but not a lot to the lighting of the scene.

At this moment the tone is quite dark and i'd like to keep it around this area, the hue is a mix between blue and grey and white, with further introduction of more emissive maps acting as static lighting i'll be able to play around with the hue and start aiming towards perhaps a more yellow colour.