1950s Alien Invasion
This is a brief that has the only restrictions of a sensible poly count that would work in a PS4 and Xbox One game with 3rd person perspective. Besides that there aren't any real restrictions.
Inspiration
When you think 1950s alien invasion I feel like the first thing most people think of is Mars Attacks or Destroy All Humans, having small grey aliens and flying saucers. However I was inspired by something different. Simon Stålenhag is a well known swedish artist that paints some great dystopian/futuristic environments. There was a particular painting of his, that I really wanted to see in a video game setting.
There is a lot of ambiguity and mystery in this scene, which I felt helped play into the alien theme, because what is truly alien is something we do not understand and the fear that comes with it.
The mechanical tendrils in the scene also reminded me of an older piece of science fiction: War of the Worlds. I thought it would be interesting to combine the two ideas of this painting and war of the worlds to create something new and interesting.
Also looking at the colour palette that is already here, there can be an interesting clash of a foggy blue atmosphere and the saturated red weeds/vines. I would have to make a few alterations to make this fit into my project, first of all I think this should take place on a farm as its the closest thing I could think of that is similar to the location in the painting. There are other things to consider as well, as how to portray 1950s america, and not confuse it with today's america.
Production
Although the idea might be interesting I need to still tie it into 1950s america, and the one thing that defined american culture of that time was cars. There are many reasons as to how this automobile culture came about, but this isn't a history lesson, this is art. I looked for all the different types of cars at the time, and I looked specifically for cars that would be used by farmers. What I settled with modelling was the 1949 Chevy Truck. I wanted to start the vehicle early as possible, since its the hero asset of the scene and helps define the setting.
I started the modeling process by strip modeling from two images in orthographic mode. However after a while I figured out that the two images weren't exactly orthographic, so the images won't line up exactly with each other. This led me to use them as rough guide, and primarily use a lot of images and my own judgement to get proportions and details correct.
After getting the car to a stage where I felt comfortable to leave it, I then moved on to creating the environment. Later on I can come back to this, however I first need to make sure I have an environment to put this asset in.
Creating Grass Foliage
I have not made any foliage since my first year on the course, and that foliage was hand painted and stylized. I wanted to learn how to create realistic foliage for current-gen games. And I thought that this project was a perfect opportunity to do so.
The first step is to create a few grass blades and apply a gradient material with 3 different colours. Then you place and bend them in whatever way you want, have enough to look full but don't have the grass blades overlapping too much.
You then bake them down to a plane and get the base colour and normal map renders. There is also a need for a height map as well, however I imported my normal map into Substance Designer and got a heightmap from there.
After the textures are compiled, bring them back into 3dsmax and apply the material onto a plane. Cut out the grass and make sure that there isn't any wasted space. Then vertex paint the plane, making the bottom black and the top red, this will be used to help with applying wind in Unreal. The red parts are going to be affected by wind the most, making it so that the roots of the grass don't move.
The next step is to make sure that all the normals of the plane are pointing upwards. This is to help with the shading of the plane, if the normals are facing one way, then the other side of the plane won't be shaded correctly and would be dark.
The final step before bringing it into unreal is to clump the planes all together to make a mass of grass.
After bringing the grass into Unreal I realized that the grass looked quite stylized, that the blades are too thick and unrealistic in proportions. I searched for a bunch of different tutorials on how to make grass. One of which was using a tool in Zbrush which is primarily used for creating fur strands.
The results were interesting and fairly realistic, however I wasn't able to get a good bake and would always turn out to be pixelated.
Also as a side note, I tried creating a landscape material within Unreal however I wasn't able to get the materials to Height-blend. Weight blending would work, but not Height blending, I even asked for help from numerous people, but we weren't able to figure out as to why it didn't work. Since I couldn't even get the landscape material to work, I thought it was best to scrap the idea of creating a landscape and focus on creating an interior for the remaining 2 weeks I had.
I think if I were to do this again, I would most likely create my foliage/grass within substance designer. As I find it to be the most comfortable and versatile tool in creating textures and images. And then at some point I need to figure out what I'm doing wrong with a landscape material. I tried creating the material in the last project, and that didn't work either, even though I followed a tutorial step by step. I feel like landscape materials might have changed with an update to Unreal.
Gradient Maps
Something that I learned in the second week, is that you can use gradient maps in UE4 similarly to Substance Designer. I was getting frustrated with not knowing how to change the colours of textures dynamically. I know that you can multiply a 3-vector node ontop of the base colour, however that tints everything to the colour you multiply it to. What I wanted was something similar to substance designer, where I can have a grey-scale image, and then plug it into different colours.
I tried all sorts of methods and even the 3ColorBlend node, however I wasn't getting the results I wanted. Since I knew exactly what I wanted I googled searched "Gradient Maps in UE4". What I eventually found is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Tz0RLH_Fs8
Basically you can make a gradient map in Photoshop, save and import it to UE4, plug the greyscale texture into the UV's of the Gradient Map, and Unreal will automatically re-colour the texture according to the gradient map. The best thing about this technique is that the gradient maps can be tiny, like 1 by 256 pixels tiny. In fact its 812 Bytes tiny. The only downside is that the colour texture becomes very simple, that you can't add more unique things such as grime or age. However to compensate for this, Decals can be applied in UE4 to break up the tiling look even more.
I create my Gradient Maps within Substance Designer, since I can see the how the gradient colours affect the texture. This allows me to spend time tweaking how the material looks before I bring it into UE4.
Using the Gradient Editor in Substance Designer I could use the Gradient Keys to help make plot the Gradient Keys in Photoshop since I can Copy and Paste the Hex Colour Code or RGB values.
Applying this in UE4, I can hook up the different gradient textures into vertex painting. Whats so great about this is that I can make the texture samples of the gradients into parameters, which allows me to swap and change the gradients in an instanced material. Which then allows me to either have different wood types, or blend between them to create a multi-colour layered model.
What I find interesting is that whilst researching I found that a lot of game companies have done this technique to quickly add variations to their assets. Valve did this with their zombie hordes.
And Bungie did this with their muzzle flashes in Halo 3. They Re-used the same cloud texture, but just applied different gradients to get a completely different look.
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