Terrain Material Test WIP

[whammes]

Hi,

I just wanted to share this image with you guys.
A terrain material I have been working on since yesterday.
It uses a variation of blending techniques; world normals, depth textures and one RGB mask image.

It still needs to be cleaned up and optimized.

So here it is:

[nvisiongameco]

Wow nice man!!!!

[JA53N]

Looks Great! Cant wait to see more

[Piranhi]

Really nice material, good work!

[whammes]

Thanks guys!

Here is another shot, added some trees:

[rebb]

Thats awesome Willy

[Shelke]

That looks incredible. Theres also some atmospherics going on, what is that?

Edit: Who is the idiot that is now running google? Google and Youtube just changed their layouts. I hate it, its ugly like an XP interface.

[whammes]

One more:

[Piranhi]

Looking even better, what's your current Triangle count? And are these just UDK assets (apart from the tree's obviously)?

[whammes]

The atmosphere is a HeightFog Actor and some balancing with the intensity/height and post effects.

Current triangle count is 12,716 + 104,363 instanced triangles. Each tree got around 1800 triangles.

All the assets are custom, including textures, post effects and materials.

Still have to add LODs to everything, but that's something for tomorrow.

[pain gate]

This looks awesome...all I can say is SHARE!!! I see some vignetting and a tiny bit of chromatic abberation too. Are you doing those in the post shader chain...the one that has the SSAO stuff in it?

You have to tell us your secrets Top notch, can't wait to see more.

[5hfifty]

Wow, incredible, great work! I'd also love to see some more of what's happening behind the scenes

[GRoss]

That looks... KICK ASS!

[Major Lee High]

Good stuff, making me want to get my ass into gear and learn this stuff again XD

[mkandersson]

Me like it alot.

[Froyok]

I cry.
That's very beautiful.

[ThePriest909]

Very nice work!
I notice you don't use precomputed shadows and there are canopy shadows in your scene. If you 're using lightmass how did you achieve lighting the trees?

[toxicpanther]

may i suggest that you smoothen the terrain a bit.
it seems very jagged,i don't know if that's what you were aiming for or not,but i would fix that,other than that,the map is beautiful,perfect shadows and great trees.
can't wait to see more.

[Dregoloth]

AMAZING! will you be releasing this for download?

[whammes]

Thanks everyone,

Here are two more highres screenshots. There is a problem with a post effect when taking highres screenshots, some clamping issue, have to look into the material.

Other then that, all fully LODed, tweaked pretty much everything, models, material, and textures.
Next step is more detail.

[alvarofer0020]

holy god the day you make a tutorial of this you gona be my hero

[whammes]

That is actually the goal of this little exercise, building a concept for a workshop.

To answer some of the questions;

Post Effects, yes they are hooked up in the post material chain. Vignette, Chromatic Aberration and Grain.

Tree lighting and shadows, the trees have only vertex lighting using lightmass. All materials are set to masked, so they work correctly with the shadowing of the dominant light. The dlight is set to use realtime shadow, radius set to 500 units.

[ThePriest909]

Thanks for the lighting info whammes.
Much appreciated.

[whammes]

Here are a few screenshots showing; wireframe, texture density, lighting, diffuse color, beauty output and post effects. I also made a few more material tweaks and added some rock models to the scene.

Wire frame:
http://www.willihammes.com/webtemp/u...01_wire_01.jpg

Texture Density:


Lighting:


Diffuse Color:


Beauty Output:


Post effects:

[nvisiongameco]

man those trees look good, and the lighting is sooo on point!

[CyborgGuineaPig]

very sweet!

[whammes]

Here is a shot of just the assets, working on some more right now:

[DELTATHUND3R]

very nice assets matey..love ya plants.

[Froyok]

Speedtree or you own work the trees and grass ?

[whammes]

Those are all my own models, haven't really looked into the speedtree tools that much yet.

[ThePriest909]

Ah, finally I understand why you were able to create those nice shadows :0) The trees are not speed tree actors but static meshes. With all the lighting problems coming with speedtree using static actors sounds like a good choice.
But what about the animations (wind effects) have you managed to do that with static mesh trees? Of cource you can use a wind source and foliage layers but usually having the trees animating at the same rate as the grass is doesn't look very realistic.

[A Rabbit]

You could vertex paint the foliage part of the tree and use a clever vertex shader to offset the leaves depending on the wind actors in the scene and add variation by changing the sway of the leaves depending on the objects world position. But saying that the shadows wont move when using the world position offset.

[pain gate]

Can you post the material you used for chromatic abberation. I tried it and couldnt get it to work once I ran the game...but it worked in the viewport It would be awesome if you could share that with us.

[whammes]

hi pain_gate,

here is a screenshot of the chromatic aberration material:

[blood_falcon]

Nice post effects whammes, just curious, would it be the same thing if you imported a texture that looks like the final result in your LensMask group?

[amigoface]

@whammes : really really beauttifull ... congratulation

any chance that you make a nice tutorial on this in the near future


i think that the outdoor terrain rendering is among the least covered aspect of udk by docs/tutorials


good day

[whammes]

@blood falcon: sure you can also use a texture to get the same effect, i actually had that in my first version but i was getting some banding against the sky so I switch to the procedural approach.

@amigoface: thanks, that's actually what i had in mind, a little workshop for creating natural environments in UDK will see how it goes. i will hopefully have figured out the foliage actors this week and add some more detail.

ta

[mickyg]

Looking great.

Can I ask if the terrain itself is a static mesh or a terrain object created in UDK? I need to create a terrain like this and I'm not sure how to go about it.

Thanks

[whammes]

Hi there,

@mickyg: Yes it's a StaticMeshes, I just painted a displacement map in Photoshop and used it to displace a 256x256 plane in max, roughly 6000x6000 UU in size. This way you also get specular on your terrain, which seems to be ignored when using a terrain mesh in UDK. Also all the plants are StaticMeshes, no foliage or SpeedTree. I actually tested a lot of different ways over the last two weeks but StaticMeshes still give the best results lighting wise and they work nicely with InteractiveFoliage actors.

Here are two new screenshots, did a lot of work on the terrain material some texture work and fog elements. Also extended the terrain, more shots coming next week.

[CrystalCore]

Amazing, looks as good as Crysis, actually i think its better!