LONELY WORKING REGIONS

This project is a large scale environment heavily inspired by the Vercors, an isolated region in France at the base of the Alps.

This is a solo project, all assets aside from the skybox are made by myself.

This project relies heavily on UE5's PCG and Nanite tools.

GALLERY

UE5 renders

Video demo

PROCESS & BREAKDOWNS

Reference Gathering

Over 300 photographical references and photoscans were gathered on location in the Vercors.

Photoscans were captured using videos shot on a phone camera and processed through Reality Capture.
Some scans did not make it to the final project.

Gaea Terrain generation work

Through this project, my aim was not to replicate the exact geography of the region, but rather to reproduce its atmosphere as authentically as possible.

Terrain generation went through many iterations.

Photographical & map reference:

Early terrain scale tests, from 500m x 500m to 10km x 10km

Later iterations:

The final map was decided to be 4km x 4km in size, as it was a good size to represent the scale of the Vercors' features without it being too big to manage.

Final version:

Landscape material

The landscape material for this project was built to be as dynamic as possible for easy iteration, and works at runtime by distributing several layers procedurally.

Landscape layers were deconstructed from reference.

The landscape material distributes 5 main biomes: Cliff, Rock, Wild meadows, Forest and Pasture.

The landscape material was constructed to accomodate for these 5 layers in this manner:

Meadow layer

Perlin noise

Height Gradient + Contrast + Luminosity

Mask is used as forest layer

Pasture mask made in Substance Designer

Photographical reference for pasture mask

Slope angle mask

Altitude mask

Mask is used as the pasture layer

X-streched Perlin

Y-streched Perlin

Y-facing vertex normal mask

Perlins are lerped using vertex normal mask

Slope angle mask

Luminosity + contrast

Mask is used as the rock layer flowing down from the cliffs

Slope mask is used as the cliff layer

Every step of this process was made editable via parameters.

Landscape textures are generated from photography using Substance Sampler

Landscape textures are scattered according to the procedural landscape material.
Noise and distance scaling are applied to the textures to break up the tiling.

Cliff sculpts

Cliffs are an integral part of the Vercors landscape.

Ref vs result:

Cliff material

The cliff material uses different layers of masks to add variation from close range and far range

Cliff Scattering

At first, cliffs were scattered procedurally according to slope angle. The results didn't correspond well to the Vercors' more uniform sedimentary cliffs.

A second attempt using splines gave better results, but caused some nanite overdraw due to the large amounts of overlapping geometry.

In the end, cliffs were simply placed by hand.

Foliage creation

Foliage was modelled according to photography taken on location in the Vercors

Early Foliage scattering tests

Foliage is scattered according to the landscape material using the landscape grass node. Within the 5 main biomes, "sub-biomes" are created using smaller masks that drive smaller foliage variation, like dead grass patches, etc.

Early tree placement tests

Using PCG graphs, placeholder tree models are scattered according to the forest landscape layer.

LOD tree cards were tested first

Nanite was later adopted as the better solution to render the bushiness of trees at far distances

Tree construction process

Leaf normal, colour and translucency map, extracted from my own photography

Tree material

Original reference on the left, and substance designer graph and material on the right

Following the reference on the left, the material graph overlays moss and lichen on the bark per tree instance.

Tree models are assembled by hand, by placing small branches on a trunk modelled according to reference.

Leaves are 100% geometry to optimize nanite use and rendering in great numbers

Beech trees in engine

Spruce tree construction

Spruce forest distribution iteration

Spruce forests in engine

Lighting

To get soft shadows under the forest canopy, the project uses ray traced global illumination.
The global illumination pass is independently controlled through the material using the Ray Tracing switch node, allowing the light bounces to be double the saturation of the on-screen colour pass.

On the left is the colour pass seen by the player, and on the right is the colour pass used by the global illumination.