Open World - Exam project

/Hi - My name is Casper Kjæhr. I am currently interning as an Enhvironment/Tech artist at Kong Orange, working an Indie title called Vokabulantis. 
For my very first The Rookies entry, I will be showing my exam project. The project was created over the spand of 5 weeks. Pre-production and RND was done beforehand. 

Procedural World Creation

For my exam project, I wanted to create a playable open world map, with proceduraly generated biome systems. In general I wanted the ability to move my camera/viewport from a frogs perspective to a birds eye view and keep a believable fidelity.
- I knew, due to my time limitations, that the project would mostly act as a proof of concept, rather than a finished product.

Keep in mind, everything(except the village) is procedurally spawned. 

Cinematic

World Creation

To achieve achieve the procedural world creation pipeline, I defined the biome generation in the form of masks from Gaea that was then to be used with the landscape layer system inside Unreal Engine. This would in turn let me control the appearance of the landscape, and then automatically produce correct masks.

The above process view shows the different geological features, before and after being blended into the heightmap //The coleration of the first image was only used for art directoion, and does not represent the final textures :) 

The above process view shows some of the different feature-masks created in Gaea 

Village Kit

In order to bring an element of storytelling into my enhvironment I made a kit for creating buildings.

Materials for the kit

For the kit materials, I made a few tileable textures and a few trim sheets in Substance Designer.

The Boulder texture was made as a generator. This meant that I could produce an unlimited number of variations with little effort. The texture was then used to displace a plane in Zbrush, decimated and deformed for the kit in maya. These parts was then integrated with the Nanite system in UE5. 

I spend a little extra time adding a few neat touches, such as grout deformation and overflow on the boulder texture.

Grass!

Even though I opted to utilize the Mega Scan library for foliage, I decided to spend some time making a good solution for grass, as this would be apparent throughout the scene. I wanted to create an optimized solution with a few shader tricks aswell.

First off, I created a grass straw generator in Substance Designer. This was a simple setup that allowed me to produce a collected straw atlas with different variations. The outputs(diffuse, SSS, roughness and normal) was then imported into speedtree for further processing. I used the atlas to make a few grass patch variations of highpoly geometry. This was then rendered out in a side view, with the result of two new atlasses, with normals pointing in the different directions they have in 3d space + the original normals from designer.

I then created the final geometry/Cards from those atlasses with LODs and variations. 

Finally I used a ramp setup in Maya to add Vertex paint for later shader usage. 

Finally x2 I also pointed the vertex normals upwards, for a more correct shading.
- This is generally important as grass should have their own normals blended with the landscape normals. This makes the shading work alot nicer, as it sort of flows with the landscape. 

See process view below for images

Thanks for reading my The Rookies entry!
I'm glad if you made it this far!
//Best regards
Casper