The Cave Lab is project designed to expand my environmental creation skills. Currently planned are one large exterior space and two interiors, all complete with unique assets created from the ground up.
The landscape is created using World Machine, imported in to UE4’s landscape system, and painted in engine.
The rocks are all free-hand sculpted in zBrush. The larger rocks have between 8-6k high poly models and 3 LODs down to 1k tris. The Medium rocks start at 3-1k with 3 LODs down to 500 tris.
The Foliage is all crated in Maya. Currently there are 3 tree models with 2 LODs, (the large going from 10k-6k-3k, and the medium/small ones at 7.5k-5k-2k), and a small assortment of plants, all with pre-painted vertex colors for wind effects. SpeedTree was considered, and I have used it before, but I decided that this route would be a more thorough learning experience. Both the leaves and the plants utilize UE4’s Two-Sided Foliage subsurface shading.
The other assortment of assets shown are created from basic box modeling techniques in Maya. They are legacy builds from early on in the project and will be improved later.
The material network shown is specifically for the rock assets. It allows for multiple tiling textures/normal maps to be used and painted in with vertex colors that are independent of mesh-scaling and positioning (I.E. they tile according to world space), along with mesh-specific normal and mask maps that can be changed through instancing. There are also functions for the use of scalable, normal-depth dependent moss growth, and a few other customizable variables, such as overall tint and normal strengths.
My current task is to begin work on the interior spaces, and their connections to the landscape.
