LogInThe Redhill Games team presented Mistvale, their latest collaborative project.
Driven by a desire to experiment and expand their skills, the team at Redhill Games set out on a collaborative project to craft this captivating landscape. Environment Artists Safeer Abbas and Lucia Souralaysak immersed themselves in every aspect of the process, building terrain in Gaea, integrating assets, learning shaders, fine-tuning lighting, utilizing foliage tools, and creating camera sequences in Unreal Engine 5.
At the same time, Pedro Borges was responsible for VFX and vegetation, adding another layer of depth and realism to the environment. The Mistvale project provided the team with hands-on experience across multiple areas of game development, enhancing both their technical and artistic expertise.
Have a closer look at the renders below:
Pedro Borges shared some details on the technical aspects of Mistvale, revealing that the most challenging part was creating the grass and wind system. Inspired by Ghislain Girardot's particle-based wind approach, he customized and expanded it to meet the project's requirements. This system is highly versatile, enabling real-time adjustments to wind direction, intensity, and dynamic gusts, offering a more responsive alternative to traditional panning wind methods.
"It was crucial that the wind be art-directable within the Sequencer and that we had effective methods to visualize it. For the vegetation shader, we needed a robust solution to properly use the wind data. By using pivot-painting techniques, we gave individual foliage elements more natural and varied movement.
Automating this process could have been achieved in multiple ways, but given the tight schedule, I opted for a Houdini tool that automatically baked essential data, such as height and pivot information, into vegetation assets. This tool was integrated with Unreal Engine via Houdini Engine, allowing artists to test their assets in real-time. I also created the few VFX present in the scene, including clouds, dust, volumetric fog, and god rays."
In the past, we've covered a few Ghislain Girardot's tutorials, including this technique on making Niagara-driven 2D wind and strand-based foliage:
For anyone interested in technical art, particularly Unreal Engine artists working with Niagara, we highly recommend checking out some of the other videos and subscribing to the YouTube channel for more fantastic tutorials:
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