An Unreal Engine test project that ended up as a Bob Ross theme :)
This short animation is far from perfect. I had set a time frame for this project to avoid going into too much detail and worked on it in December 2020. My original intention was to create assets for Unreal Engine using Blender (modeling) and Quixel Mixer to see how I could use Unreal Engine for my Archviz projects, performance was secondary for me on this project.
Details:
Berge
The mountain was created in Blender with the ANT Landscape addon and then the different textures like snow, rock, grass and soil were mixed in a material shader. Then the mesh duplicated, decimated and the textures baked highpoly -> lowpoly.
Hütte
To save some time, I used a free model from Blendswap to have an eye catcher in the scene. But I also quickly realized that I would have to fix the mesh and put time and effort into the UV layout, etc., but in the end I managed to import it as an fbx into Quixel Mixer and thanks to the color ID maps I had created in Blender I was able to edit the model in Mixer in separate parts.
Blendswap model: https://www.blendswap.com/blend/20445
Animation with the sequencer
In the sequencer the cameras were animated, keyframes for elements like exponential height fog or directional light were created and also the animation of eagle, deer and flock of birds were included in the sequencer. The inclusion of the bird flock as a Niagara Particle System has the great advantage that by tracking the "system life cycle" the time of the particle spawn can be placed outside the clip.
The deer was part of the free "animal variety pack" from the Unreal Marketplace.
Der Adler kam aus diesem kostenlosen Vogelpaket von cgtrader ohne Animationen
https://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/animals/bird/game-ready-bird-collection
The eagle got a rig and a basic animation in Blender and was exported fbx with the animation to Unreal Engine
Animation with the Niagara particle system
To add a flock of birds, I used this method from a UE tutorial
https://youtu.be/IDNi0plxIXE?t=3118
Creation of the test environment
- Sculpting the foreground landscape and the background landscape
- Adding the mountains as far distance mesh
- Test of the water material with screen space reflections, spherical / planar reflections
The left part of the image shows only the screen space reflections, which leads to a fade out in the reflection at the edge of the image. To avoid this, a reflection capture actor must be used, in this case a planar reflection capture in the right part of the image, but this is extremely performance-hungry.
- Tests with the LOD-System
- foliage paint tool for foreground landscape with megascan assets and elements from the free content packs I've collected from the UE marketplace over the last few months
- Setting up a procedural foliage volume for the background landscape
- Test of the new volumetric cloud system with a directional light as sun and a SkyAtmosphere