Encounter 2 - More environment progress (Patreon)

After doing the last touches on Zoe, I've gotten right back to working on the new environment for the next Encounter episode! This has overall taken a little longer than expected, as it took me multiple days to troubleshoot render crashes that kept occuring with the background environment you're seeing above. I drastically reduced the amount of trees, which mitigated the amount of crashes significantly, but they still occur every 50 - 100 frames of rendering. Oddly enough, they're almost completely gone if I remove the water plane, or make it opaque, which hints at a possible issue with transparency over-allocation. A new GPU with more VRAM might fix that, but they're still out of stock everywhere in Europe. Le sigh.

With the 3D background layer being finished, I was finally able to move on to the actual "playing field", which will be a small foresty area with lots of greenery. Here's a shot that I had previously blocked out, which is now decorated with lots of geometry and fancy PBR shaders. I'm using a lot of Quixel Megascans for the geometric detail here. The surface texture channels have been created using Quixel Mixer and Photoshop, with every asset using 8K textures for almost each channel. I'll still need to optimize the scene and will probably have to downsample some of the textures that are a little further away from to camera to either 4K resolution, or even lower.

The visual tone I want to strike is somewhat inspired by The Last of Us, featuring a mountainous area with lots of pine trees, ferns (to be added later), cloudy weather and a slight drizzle, leaving all surfaces slightly slightly wet and muddy. The lighting you're seeing isn't final yet, but fairly close to it. I'll likely place a few more light sources to simulate GI style bounce lighting a little better, this will also brighten up the scene ever so slighty!

In terms of visuals I have a pretty good feeling that this is likely going to become the best looking project I've ever put out. It even looks significantly better in motion, as all the trees move in the wind, along with other elements such as vegetation, water, clouds, and Zoe's hair. I'm going the extra mile and make rigs for nearly all of the vegetation groups, so they're affected by wind movement as well. Note that I work in Maya, so I need to come up with all of these dynamics myself, which can sometimes take a decent amount of time.

The complexity of the assets lies somewhere in between game and film quality, with the majority of them using the highpoly versions of those found in the Megascans library. I made use of Simplygon to reduce these to roughly 1/10 of their original poly count, which is still ten times higher than what current game assets use. The trees you're seeing were actually lowpoly assets that I've retextured with new displacement and normal maps to significantly increase their detail, all while keeping render times managable.

Note that this environment is still work in progress and currently lacks any foliage and micro assets, which I'll add throughout the next days.