Star Wars - Redemption | Work in Progress #11

Work In Progress / 15 August 2018

Hi everyone !

Things are moving forward on our project, I've added a new map called "Lumberia" which is the natal planet of Mevenn, the heroin of the game. Lumberia is under construction as Geonosis and Space map, it's very WIP but at the moment it's my favorite environment, things here are flourish, vivid, and full of colors ! This map was born months ago just as an idea of making an environment with vegetation, a green touch and a needed breath into the project which had only rocks, sand and sci-fi props everywhere. I wanted to make a mix between nature and these assets, and I also wanted to better the Mevenn's story, so here came Lumberia...I may add conceptarts later, I need to finish them and there's a lot to tell about this new place =)

First try with the first trees/grass shaders I made for Lumberia, cool but a bit noisy and damn laggy =/

( Here are few assets I made for Lumberia )

But if trees are cool, flowers adds a nicer touch to the landscape, so I tried to do some, and reworked how the grass worked ( from model to shader )

Yeaaah, almost that ! Now I just need to create a real landscape heightmap. For this task, I reused the Lumberia cliff's heightmap mixed with some variators (a "variator" is a custom noise I made by hand, well it's just a cool grayscale texture ^^"), it was done on substance designer, which has a really nice potential for this I think (with a bit more practice I could do some cool base for my levels). Once this map is imported into unreal I can quickly draw my foliage, it's WIP, but it's really pleasant to play in this animated and peaceful forest...;)

And of course now all things are optimized so you can really make huge plains of grass or ultra-dense forests ;)

I've also added Tesselation on the landscape materials, a feature that really adds to the environment surfaces variation feeling when you walk, for example, on Geonosis's Sand or near Lumberia's RockClifs

Another cool thing is about the skymap, which was a bit ugly when you looked at it under sunscattered fog. I used Normalmap compression setting and used channels Red and Green to define sky/coulds colors and add some movement near the sun area and all "lighted" clouds, so now skies live and their textures looks good ;)

I've aslo reduced the polycount of Mevenn's face which was ridiculously too high compared to the other character's parts

And also I've added more possibilities on her face rig, so now Thomas Chaumel can add creepy feel on her teeth by pushing out Mevenn's canines (and updated a little the joints hierarchy, added controllers and more joints for the tongue)

I've added some new facial expressions, but didn't have played on an expression yet which use these new controllers

I've also done several Tileable materials using mainly 3D-Coat with ZBrush & Substance Designer, I'm still not good at making my base shapes in SubstanceDesigner, especially when it comes to stylized ones, but maybe one day I'll get it ^^" Noises are often stylized and handdrawn ones made on 3D-Coat/Photoshop ( I used them first for my StarWarsRedemption smartmaterial's library, they still looks pretty cool on Designer =) )

-> Venator Wall 01