In this project, I was trying to keep all the meshes look clean but irregular. To achieve this, I modelled the assets with smooth surface as normal firstly then used Remesh and then Reduce on the target objects as well as moved or merged some vertices until it reached a good look with Harden Edge and Set to Face Normals settings.

Dock

I combined all the meshes as the whole dock in Maya instead of positioning in UE one by one.

I made some traces on the objects and bevelled all the meshes to avoid sharp feelings.

Before combining, I divided and set meshes into different material groups so that I can change the texture and colour for each part in UE.

The first time I tried to assign triangle faces to different materials but I found it look a bit messy, and it looks too sharp without bevelling.

Mountains

For the mountains, I sculpted in Mudbox first and sent it to Maya to remesh and reduce.

I was going to assign triangular faces to different materials, but it looks unnatural hence I did not do it.

Stones

For the stones, there is a method for the stylization with displace modifiers. It is easier to do in Blender.

The operation can be done on the sphere or cube or whatever, but it looks greater with the sphere as the original mesh.

For the project, I made some stones and downloaded some free sources from the marketplace. I bevelled a few small stones but keep big ones sharp.

lotus

Butterfly

For the flying butterfly, I animated it in Maya with skeletons and imported it into UE. Next time I will try to use bueprint in UE to make an interacted butterfly with game AI.

https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/Resources/Showcases/BlueprintExamples/Butterfly/

Flowers

In the beginning, I was going to add flower meshes with corrected normals in the scene, but it looked not desirable with other meshes so I removed it at the end.

Character

I used the chibi character that I modelled for my last project, I made a low-poly hat for the person and then rigged it using Mixamo, then checked and painted it Maya to fix any issues. I also downloaded some animations including idle, walking, jumping, from Mixamo.

After many attempts, I found that gradient colour textures look better than assigning triangular faces with different materials.

For most of the assets like dock, lotus, stones and mountains, I used lerp nodes to create gradient colour textures in UE material editors.

For the butterfly, I created the shape texture with red and green channels in Photoshop, then set the colour in UE.

Waterfall

For the waterfall, I used two kinds of material, and then I modified them using material instances.

Another one is from the UIWS plugin, however, it does not work in UE4.27, so I created related materials in my project. The water looks very clean and fluid. Initially, it only works for the spline assets which are defined by the plugin system, then I modified the coordinates with new nodes to make it work in my project.

UIWS:

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/uiws-unified-interactive-water-system

Character

I used a cloudy material assigned to the character’s body, and set the emissive colour to make it shine in the dark.

Water

The stylized water material I created before cannot be used to set physical simulations, so I decided to use realistic water in UE4.27 water plugin.

I created a landscape before using the water plugin.

Floating lotus

I added buoyancy under lotus mesh, it needs some pontoons, otherwise, it will not keep balance in the water.

Also, need to check the asset is set to auto-activate.

Lighting

Skylight is set to stationary to use real-time capture. To enable real-time capture, the volumetric cloud component or sky atmosphere component must be put in the scene.

One of the issues when using low-poly meshes in UE4 is the vertex normal will turn the region become black which cannot be solved by modifying the normals.

Hence I checked all the options and found that enabling indirect shadow only under lightmass settings will solve the issue.

The sunlight will go through the landscape at night so I put a solid cube under the landscape to block the lights.

Third Person Character

I used blueprint for animation and event. For Jump, is Falling is used to decide; for walk and run, speed is used to decide.

To

Animation blendspace is created for smooth transition of actions.

Copy and paste skydome BP and cloud texture from UE source to our content and make some changes on the mappings.

sky texture

In order to create our own stylized sky texture, I first use 6144*2048 resolution canvas with alpha channel, paint and loop around it. The final image should be scaled down to 2048*2048.

In photoshop we can use offset to create seamless looping texture.

cloud texture

For the cloud I use 2048*1024 pixels texture. This is a black and white maskout texture.

We can add more cloud layers to make a more dynamic movement.

Environment painting analysis

For the final project, I decided to rebuild the environment created by Slawek Fedorczuk, in unreal engine 4.27.

Slawek Fedorczuk is a very creative artist especailly in color design. His painting is always breathtaking. The scene looks neither cartoonish nor completely realistic. The base color or local color design is more dreamy with delicate color variation around it. It emphasised the play of ‘natural’ light which gives a feeling of impressionist paintings. Although rich colors are used here, the scene still look very clean.

The sunlight direction can be found through the shadow.

The color of the water seems to be blue and it turns to be green when meeting with yellow light.

Some part of the dock turn to be purple and some just covered by blue water on our side.

Texture

For this scene, all the assets look irregular with abstract strokes as texture. Hence I adopt the method from https://80.lv/articles/stylized-nature-vegetation-animation-shaders/

I use white textures with alpha channel for the static assets, compressed at a 256×256 size. All the colors are controlled through ue material system, which makes it easier to match color to achieve a desired result in the real-time scene.

Dock

I model multiple lowpoly planks and stakes, them merge them together in maya as it is easier to precisely position the asset to match the correct position as the illustration shows using maya. I set the normals as conform because they all have sharp edges in stylization.

I use five materials for the whole dock, unwrap the UV properly and create black and white mappings in photoshop to mimic the strokes. I also generate normal maps to give some uneven texture.

Mountains

I use the same technique as what some artists create stylized trees. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/9QGVy

I start with modelling the mountain shapes which match to the reference in general.

Firstly I create the three planes which are perpendicular to each other and then set the UV. After that I combine the these planes and transfer the vertex normals from the mountain shape to the combined planes to correct the normals.

Character and animation

Butterfly

I create butterfly from a simple two-polygon mesh, I skin the wings with the skeletons and make the animation for import into UE4.

By observing the trajectory of the butterfly’s wings, I set that the rotation range of the wing bones is from -20° to 70° within Z axis.

WATERFALL MESH AND MODELLING IN MAYA

Material in UE4

I create waterfall material and then create its instance to control the parameter groups. Color and vfx can be controlled through adjusting these parameters.

Here I create black and white texture in Photoshop for waterfall.

I also use fresnel function

Blendmode should be translucent in this case.

https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/RenderingAndGraphics/Materials/HowTo/Fresnel/

I use additive as blend mode in order to achieve a transparent waterfall effect.

Project settings

autoexposure _off

engine-rendering enable virtual texture support _on

generate mesh distance fields _on

Content Browser

RVT- Runtime virtual texture