I’ve been interested in environments for a while so I wanted to try it. It’s basically my first time doing environments so I don’t really know what I’m doing, I posted this under works in progress but it’s more like 50/50 works in progress and me asking for help, so I have a few questions, I would be really happy if you answered it.
This is a part of a game idea I had for a while, it is an watchtower/camp, but it was abandoned and now bandits are using it as a base, at least that’s the idea. It overwatches a city, you can see the rough sketches in the images. Player will start here, and will proceed towards the city. And I’m planning it to be top down/isometric camera, so I’ll have to keep that in mind while designing the map.
Honestly it’s not anything serious, I’m not actually planing to finish it, it’s more of an excuse for me to get in game dev and environment modelling.
Most of the rocks and textures are from quixel megascans, it was very convenient since everything in there become free.
Ok, now my questions are these,
How do I fill the rest of the scene and make it interesting? It looks so empty and flat right now, I don’t want to put too many rocks, otherwise it looks like it’s a mountainous area, and when I try to put grass etc. I still can’t seem to make it work, which ties to my second question.
How do I go about the vegetation, I tried using particle scatter for it but it doesn’t look good at all and I have to put millions of particles for it to look somewhat decent, and it slows down the viewport too much, is this how it’s done or is there a trick for it? In the reference images there is a grass and moss mixture, but it’s so dense that I’m not sure if doing it with particles is the correct way. I know there are some paid addons for this, but I would like to do it without any paid addon.
Honestly I’m a bit confused at his point, if you could point me a direction on where to go from here and how to improve it, or recommend me some tutorials I would appreciate it.
I’m kind of starting to regret choosing this type of terrain as my first project but too late now.
The moss is more complicated than I expected, simple texture won’t work, I watched some tutorials but since each moss plant is so small it would take insane amount of geometry to cover the entire surface, so I had to come up with something else.
I’m still experimenting with it, I think it looks somewhat decent but still not quite there yet. What I did is that, I took a mossy rock model from megascans, I separated the top part where the moss is, put another moss texture while keeping the normals in order to be consistent with the colors then put those models on the surface with lattice and shrinkwrap modifiers.
But now I have another problem, I’m starting to run out of memory while rendering the scene. I have a decent pc so I thought I would be ok at least for a while but that’s not the case. I’m using instancing (duplicating with alt+d instead of shift+d) but other than that I’m not sure how to optimize, I’m open to any suggestions.
I think I’m going to focus covering the background for now. I’m wondering if sculpting by hand would be enough, I could use something like houdini to generate simple hills but that might complicate the project more than it should so I’m not sure.
I’m also experimenting with the lighting. At first I was planning to have an overcast weather, maybe rain too, but no matter what I try it looks so bad that I’m starting to change my mind, maybe something like sunrise, early in the morning?
I am not that experienced with environments myself, but I recognize some of your thoughts, so here are my two cents:
Although it’s called an “environment”, you actually do not have to model everything in a square kilometer, as you’d normally only show part of it. So I’d start with laying/blocking out the scene, finding a camera angle that works for you and then filling in things gradually. I just happen to watch a video covering this process in only 14 min, that was very well done (@Covingsworth), better than I could do here.
Now you mentioned a “player”, so if that is for a game, this is of course different. I have no experience in game design, but I would argue that if your scene is already slow in blender, most engines will struggle as well. In that case it might be a better solution to create your assets in blender, retopologize them and bake your textures, and then assemble your scene within your engine of choice. Then you can make use of engine-specific features, like level-of-detail modes where e.g. your moss is only shown in a certain distance to the player, and otherwise hidden to increase performance.
Yes I’m aware that I don’t really need to model everything but since it will be a game I cannot choose a camera angle and make it look good only that angle, it needs to look good on every angle. Though since I’m planning to make it isometric camera it restricts the angle the scene will be viewed, which at least in theory should make it easier.
I saw that tutorial just a few days ago, and I already implemented some stuff in the video, it was really helpful, thank you for sharing.
It would be really hard to export this scene exactly to a game engine, so I’m considering this as more like a concept than a final design. The textures are all 2k since that’s the lowest I can get on megascans, but it’s way too high for my game. I’m considering making my own models and textures rather than using scanned models in the end, because I’m aiming for something less realistic and detailed, and eventually I will do this from scratch in the game engine but for now I’m using scanned assets to make the process faster.
I changed the moss, now I only use particles rather than lattice because it was too slow. I also changed the color, now the scene looks more bright, the previous one looked too dark I think. I changed the fog color too, white fog fits more.
I lowered the texture scaling and increased the normal strength to something like 5, it doesn’t look too realistic from close up, but I think it looks better from far away.
The roads lack detail right now, and some of the colors are off, but I think the atmosphere is more or less there. I should tweak the lighting more to make it look more interesting, and give more variation to the rocks, right now I use like 3 rocks, other than that, I’m open to any suggestions on how to improve it.
I think I’m gonna call it done. I’m pretty happy with the result. Of course there are so many things to improve, and it’s far from a finished work, but it wasn’t really my goal. I learned a lot and had fun and that’s enough for me.
