Unreal Engine Grass
I was responsible for making the grass in our UE Scene. We wanted a very painterly look so my initial approach was to make a tillable grass texture and use paint it onto my landscape using the land paint brush in UE. I made my tillable texture in photoshop and tried to set up a material that would allow me to paint my landscape. The process was very straight forward but I ran into trouble right at the last step when it was meant to automatically load my material onto my landscape. For some reason my material wouldn't load but after much trial error, a friends and I discovered it was because of the landscape had more than one square (similar to a hectare of land). So the solution to this was applying the land material to each the squares individually.
Although my material finally worked, I noticed that the grass texture was at a very small scale and didn't look as nice as I'd hoped. Unfortunately I could not figure out how to rescale the texture so I decided to just use flat colours. I wasn't to disappointed though since it still allowed us to achieve the stylised look we were after. I set up a virtual texture which allowed me to add a subtle wind effect to the grass and also enabled the grass to mimic the same colours I painted on my landscape. I used this very helpful tutorial on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEMe-kcZBLw
However as I was adding in the grass, my file kept crashing and made it impossible to finish the landscape. Through the help of a friend we figured out it was because the rendering engine was set to Direct-12x. Fortunately when I switched it to Direct-11x my file stopped crashing and I was able to finish laying down my grass.
Although I'm fairly happy with the result I did run into some minor issues. The foliage brush - which I used to lay down my grass - was effective for covering large areas, I discovered that it was hard to control the precise placement of my grass even when trying to lay down a single grass cluster. For example when I was laying the grass around the pond some of it would get in the water. but when I tried to remove it, it would also remove some of the grass in areas I wanted it to stay. therefore there is not as much grass in the foreground as I would like but it was the best I could achieve.
Bear Fur
Initially I was having trouble previewing my fur simulation in Houdini. Although I thought I had taken all the necessary steps to preview the Houdini fur in Redshift it would not show in the render view. Eventually with the help of my lecturer, we figured out it was mainly because a setting on the fur was still set to render from Mantra (default render) rather than it being from Redshift. Once we changed this though the fur was finally showing in the render view.
However the hair shader I created for the fur did not look very good in the render. It was far too glossy/ reflective and had an undesirable orange tinge. I struggled to fix the look of the fur so luckily my lecture was willing to tinker around with it and see what they could do. Fortunately they managed to create a look that was fairly close to our original fur reference and left some useful notes on how they achieved this.
Main reference image:
Result that Lecturer managed to achieve:
Working from this, I proceeded to tweak things and apply my own textures. I am definitely very happy with this result and am glad I took the challenge to learning the Houdini groom tools rather than sticking to the original plan of having no fur. The softness this fur simulation adds to the bear helps to tie our character to the real world setting but still allows him to maintain a stylised look.
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