Abandoned in the Woods (or something...I don't know what to call it..)
This is a project I've been wanting to make a start on for a while, ever since I first saw some images online of Chatillon Car Graveyard in Belgium (have a look; it's gorgeous, eerie and awesome). I really loved the overgrowth and decay, and the whole nature-finds-a-way vibe. I've chosen to create an environment scene based on this, but with a single wrecked up car - a Volkswagen 1957 Beetle. It's been a long time, maybe even over a year since I last made time for myself to get into some personal 3D work, and I am loving it. Plus it's abut time I sunk my teeth into UE4 after being in UE3 for so long previously. Also - I really feel like I need to get on with learning Substance Designer & Painter, I've heard so many good things about it.
I'm about a 7 days in and have been working my way through my props list and shader creation. I started with the car first, followed by ferns, grass, pine trees and a couple of sculpted rock variations. There is a bit of shader sharing going on with the car exterior, rocks and tree trunks, where I've created a section of the material that allows moss to appear in the model based on world position. I've had way too much fun (and probably too much time too) tweaking this as it allowed for so much variation in my models. It also helped a lot with the overgrown look I'm going for.
Work in progress so far:
Work in progress so far:
The car in 3DsMax before being bashed up a little in Mudbox:
I'm also in the middle of playing around with displacement on the tree bark and terrain, they look really great - although I've got these unplugged in the shaders at the moment because they make my PC cry. To help in other areas of performance, I've started adding LODs, trees were the first, it helped loads. Although there is a known bug in UE4 at the moment where if you use Foliage Instancing with a mesh that is set up with a LOD, the LODs don't seem to come in at the right axis- it makes my scene look like I've got a deforestation problem, trees fallen over everywhere! I worked around it by setting the LOD distance larger so that they swap out with the HDs later; it's not a great workaround though as performance could be better if not for this problem.
There's still a lot to do here. I want decals, forest floor debris, to finish the other materials for the car, and to sort out my ugly grass and terrain that I've just shoved in. I've got a few more holiday days off work so I'm hoping I'll get to near enough finish this little project by then :)