Week 7 - Fun with check boxes!
This is the first week I've had where I've really started to get the lighting to a point where Im happy with it! In last weeks antics, I got some great feedback for my lighting in the sense that my values weren't reading correctly which didn't help my scenes depth read well at all. My first mission was to get rid of solid black values in the scene which I did by iterating on the environment intensity slider in UE4 with a pale blue colour which I am using effectively as a sky light. The reason I had taken out the skylight to begin with was because even on the lowest intensity, the effects were way too obvious and in your face for this quite delicate scene when lighting. On top of this, I wanted the lighting to help establish 3 groups of values to separate the foreground, middle-ground and background instead of all the values reading the same on everything. I feel that this has really started to unify everything together and shows off the atmosphere of the original scene much better.
On a side note, I started looking into Landscape photography to see what kinds of effects that people are getting with different lenses and aspect ratios. My thinking was that tailoring the field of view and ratio for each image, it seems to make the layout of images and just adds to interest of the beauty shots from the level. My aim now is to set dress my favourite shots appropriately to just help get a pleasing composition but as much as the rest of the scene at it stands, I'm hitting that point where I just need to finish up a couple of textures that are outstanding and from there on out, it should just be progressively tweaking as Im working on my supporting scene.
Also this week, it seemed appropriate to do the rope splines of the scene to add way more interest to the staircase. My general philosophy when placing these ropes was that I needed them to look as though they were hanging nicely and being effected gravity whilst also having areas of strain where the rope has been tightly wrapped. To add even more interest, I created some fisherman buoys to dot around. This is also added to the general boat theme of the scene as well so it was a win win scenario.
To add to the set dressing theme of this weeks update, I got around to adding the detailed elements to the boat. I now have the splinter and wooden board combo to a point where I'm nearly happy with it and I had some fun cluttering it up a bit with ropes, leaves, flowers and buoys. Its also been challenging to find a pleasing transform for the boat also because I really want the boat to read pretty easily from the distance shot.
I also decided to improve the foliage textures this week by re painting the map to show off the right level of details for where each piece is in the scene. For instance, the leaves above needed a lot more love and attention to detail because I had originally created a very bland leaf texture that didn't fit the LOD's from the textures around which meant that it looked really jarring to look at.
I also needed to improve the reed alphas because they weren't reading well from a distance. The reason for that is because they were extremely thin which never gets pleasing results, low resolution because I made too many iterations on the same map and I had to place them at a much greater density to get a fuller looking area. After re painting the textures and cleaning it up, I found that I can now place a lot less to get a good effect going. Not only does this look visually better, but it also meant that the overdraw was greatly reduced and is much kinder on performance.
Finally, I should explain the title of the blog. After many iterations of trying to create an effective hanging moss effect, I'm finally getting it to a happy medium of soft detail with the translucent shading. The way I've set it up is that when you get further away from the texture, the opacity increases so that it looks nice and filled out from a distance, but then when you get close to the vines, they slightly decrease in opacity so that there not noisy to look at. This has been a big struggle to get right because I needed to find an efficient, yet effective way of creating the moss. The final challenge for this material however was that when the material was set to translucent, it rendered horribly from a distance because it wasn't being effected by the fog in the scene. However, it turns out after much head scratching, there's a checkbox for this in the material editor that was created to solve this exact problem. Every now and then, I have to remind myself to not over-complicate something that could potentially have a very simple solution and to try and look for this first before going further down the rabbit hole.
As this scene starts to come down the final stretch, you might notice that my updates feel a little mix and matched in what I have been working on. It's likely that the next weeks update will be colour-grading, lighting tweaks and improving textures to polish the scene much in the same way. This being said, I have started looking into the Diorama scene that's up next which will bring the posts back to a more natural progression in my workflow. This being said, I am really happy with how this scene is coming together and cant wait to get it finished and I'll catch you all up next week!