Giorgi Chitidze shared some tips on the production of awesome scenes in Unreal, with Speedtree and Megascans.
Hello, My name is Giorgi and I’m from Georgia. It’s a small country, so learning anything about 3D or other IT stuff is pretty difficult, I studied 3D by myself. I’ve also participated in game jams, so I started to learn gamedev. Now I’m studying at a international IT Step Academy and also working on a project and I’m pretty excited to show it to the world.
My main goal in this project was to create something really good, but response about this was astonishing. Also, I can say that this is a demo level of my upcoming project, so I was testing skills.
All I can say about SpeedTree and Megascans is that these software products are immersive and easy-to-use and also allow to achieve a really good-looking levels, but the idea of using these software solutions together is that I wanted to create a forest scene for a game and so I wanted the variations of assets to create something organic and so SpeedTree and Megascans are the keys here, because they give unlimited variations of organic assets.
With Megascans and Unreal Engine 4 I used default values, but it was mainly about materials, because well designed materials with good lightning are giving impressive visuals. The assets I’ve used here are from Megascans subscription and also from a free library.
Materials here are, of course, PBR. I’ve used Tesselation, Sub Surface Scattering and Parallax occlusion together to achieve this level of detail. Using them together is good, but also pretty expensive for PC to render.
Lightning here is fully dynamic because I’m tired of building it statically, but as I’ve said before it’s expensive as well. The key here is Unreal Engine 4, because its volumetric lightning is immersive, giving really good looking lightning here. But when we are talking about lightning inside the engine or any other rendering software, we need to know the time of the day. We need to define the atmosphere and decided whether we should choose a stylized approach.
The biggest challenge here was the idea of environment, assets and, of course, lightning, because setting up good lightning is very difficult. When working on this small environment I’ve learned a lot about creating right assets, using them together and also achieving a good-looking lightning.