Create Halo's Blood Gulch in UE4

hi everyone this is Jack from quick salir a few weeks ago I was given a list of concepts from which I could pick one environment and recreate it and the moment I saw Hilo I knew this is what I wanted to make as a die-hard fan of the franchise who spent countless out in this video I'll be giving you an in-depth breakdown of how the terrain mountains and the sky came to be if you're an unreal user you can recreate this map for free just check out the link in the description below with that said let's get started the first thing I did was I reinstalled halo the Master Chief collection back onto my xbox one X and started looking at all the different remakes and iterations of Blood Gulch I started with the original in order to reefa million rise myself with the map and then I moved on de Loup to swagulated halo reaches hemorrhage and of course the remastered halo 2 version of the map after collecting in-game references and moved on to gathering some original concept images from halo combat Evolved that really helped me better figure out what bungees original vision of the game was without technical restrictions in mind it was also really important that I gather real-world references especially for the organic elements of the scene environments like this aren't very common in the real world so it was vital that I make proper logical connections between the desert like part of the environment and the greenery of the scene I will explain in depth how I made this as realistic as possible later in the breakdown once I had to block out setup in Maya I imported it into unreal placed a few cameras around where to have my primary shots and then added some basic lighting that emulated the original Maps magic our lighting after setting up my shots I needed to adjust the block out and lighting a lot in order to achieve a look that's even more epic than the original for example the ring required a lot of visual trickery in order to make it feel as big as it is while still connecting the map in a way that makes sense for this environment I really wanted to adopt some of the original promotional screenshots of the map in order to really have a one-to-one transition from the original game to the scene that I made here you can see a comparison of the original image I referenced and the final version as you can see while I started with a 1 to 1 block out of the original map I made a lot of changes in order to improve the composition and scale of the environment for example I made the ring much more of a focus than it might be in an official release since it's much more important to my composition but my compromise gameplay in a game scenario with the scene now properly set up in ue4 with a basic block out camera angles and lighting pass done I went to bridge and started looking for some rocks that would be suitable for the cliffs for this environment I really wanted some cliffs that had a lot of chips cuts and plenty of ledges to look at I felt that it made things look really crisp in next-gen compared to the original the other benefit is that the rocks would catch the lighting far better than some smooth cliff sides when entering the layout phase it's really important to consider ways in which you can blend the different rock surfaces you've gathered making sure the match color is always important but something I decided to add was a sort of z up shader to display an even colored sand across all of the rocks this gave the rocks the similarity to one another that really helped make everything look like it belonged together to do this I connected a world align blend node with explicit normals into this linear interpolate node then connected my main albedo into one channel and my other textures into the other inputs the layout phase is probably one of my favorite parts of making environments because you can see a lot of progress in a very short period of time it's also one of the most creative times when making an environment now that we have a bit more of the rocks placed I noticed that I'm not liking how dominant the sand layer is I'm going to go into the material instances and adjust some of them one by one in order to achieve a better balance between the original albedo maps and the sand after creating a very basic landscape material I found the tracks leading around and away from the base really lacking they didn't look realistic and the texture started repeating themselves a lot I knew I would need to take a different approach in order to bring the dirt paths up to my standards I decided to take a mesh decal approach using the spline system in Unreal Engine 4 the first thing I did was I created a basic mesh that had enough cuts that it would be easily deformed without causing texture stretching issues it also needed to be raised in order to separate itself from the base terrain after that I needed to make a spline blueprint in order to be able to follow the curves of the road properly it's rather simple but I've decided to include both the blueprint and the road mesh in the description for download as I thought someone might find it useful the last thing I wanted to do with the tracks is find a better way to blend them with the terrain I decided that using pixel depth offset was sufficient in making this transition look really nice I did that by multiplying the temporal a a node with a constant one vector and then I plugged that into the pixel depth offset input I used the same technique in order to achieve a nice blend between the base and the ground as well the foliage in the scene was a real challenge for a number of reasons after looking over the original scene I knew would be vital to the overall art direction that I have some foliage in the scene I took two major approaches in deciding what foliage I wanted to use from bridge the first thing I knew I needed was large medium small and really small transitional foliage that almost wouldn't be noticeable unless it was missing with that in mind I knew I wanted some dead trees some bushes and shrubs some grass some weeds and some four-leaf clovers this allowed me to create gradient from the largest foliage which is typically located near the center of the green patches to the smallest foliage which transitions naturally to the dirt paths the next thing I wanted to keep in mind is everything needed to look like it belongs in the environment based on real-world references luckily in bridge the foliage is often labeled very accurately and I was able to look them up in order to see if they grew in areas that could look something like this for example while using jungle foliage might look cool in this environment it wouldn't be very realistic and something would look very wrong consciously or even subconsciously after deciding on the foliage is pretty simple to put together I started with the largest bits of foliage such as the trees and started building up foliage around them this method really helped to keep the gradients from large to small scale details really easy and natural as soon as I started working on the scene I knew I would need to allocate a significant amount of time to making the Sky box look phenomenal Bunji you've always been masters at making sky boxes and I knew that would need to be something that had to be up to their quality bar with that in mind I developed a plan to tackle the Sky box in three stages the ring itself and its surface the transitional 3d geometry such as the cliffs and mountains and finally the clouds the ring surface was pretty simple I already had the shape properly blocked out so all I had to do was UV it then I went into quick Suleman and created a tileable terrain that I could apply to the ring surface and mixer I combined a couple of rock surfaces and added a distinct blue liquid layer to achieve a terrain surface look the next challenge was adding the 3d geometry to blend from the cliffs in the environment to the background brain at first I did some 3d background mountains that are using pixel depth offset to blend with the surface of the Ring that really helped to give the ring more depth I also made sure to add additional cliffs further back on the scene to make sure the desert appeared a bit larger than just a small loop in Canyon after adding the 3d geometry I knew I needed clouds to tie everything together for this instance my only real option was to use cloud cards since I had so much 3d geometry in my skybox I decided to use sky guard in quantum meta clothes from the marketplace in order to fill out my skybox with cloud cover I place clouds right around the main cliffs between the cliffs in the background and even between some of the 3d Mountains this really helps sell the sense of scale that I was trying to convey lighting was another big challenge for me on this map I'm using physically-based dynamic distance field lighting it was a real challenge to make things look really nice while keeping performance relatively acceptable my process for lighting an environment is pretty consistent and easy to follow the first thing I did was I activated mesh distance fields being such a large environment I knew I would need to utilize distance field lighting in order to get both distance field AO on the rocks and foliage but also in order to get good-looking shadows far in the distance without killing the performance of the scene you can activate mesh distance fields by going to edit project settings rendering and under lighting you can check generate mesh distance fields after that I looked at my primary light source which is the Sun on a bright sunny day I could expect a physical value of 110,000 Lux from that light source with that in mind I semi primary directional light to 100 thousand locks and then I adjusted the in-game Eevee exposure settings to my own taste now that my primary light was set up in a physically accurate way and my exposure settings were correct I added a skylight I adjusted the skylight settings in order to achieve good looking bounce lighting without caring about the actual values that was inputting this was the result of more of an artistic experiment than using a specific physically accurate value the key thing I did here to achieve really nice results as I adjusted the distance field ambient occlusion settings a lot and I also changed the lower hemisphere color to something lighter and warm changing the lower hemisphere color can very often give the impression of nice bounce lighting in open areas that are lit by the outdoors for this scene it worked very well in providing a nice warm bounce lighting especially on the cliffs the other thing I nted a lot was the distance field ambient occlusion properties this proved to be really finicky and I can never really seem to find the settings that work for every scene experimentation was key and after a lot of trial and error I found some settings that worked really well for me the last thing I want to touch on with lighting is distance field shadows this can be found back in the primary directional light cascaded shadow maps are expensive and if you have a lot of foliage in your scene like I do dynamic lighting can bring your scene to a performance standstill reducing the distance of dynamic house key negates and using the lowest number of dynamic shadow cascades as I could really help the performance but made the scene shadows in the distance to look terrible that's where distance field shadows come into play I activated them at the highest default settings and my performance was still very strong but the shadows looked like I had them maxed out again even though I did most of the work on this project myself I can't take all of the credit during the whole process I received invaluable feedback from my fellow team members and Victor even went the extra mile to do a final polish pass for me feedback is the foundation for artists improving themselves even if you don't have a team take to the internet and post for feedback on forms such as polycount Facebook groups such as the quick salar community or even Twitter I hope you've enjoyed and learned something from this video and don't forget to check out Friday's live stream where I'll be giving you an in-depth look into all the natural aspects of this environment and stay tuned for the sci-fi bunker breakdown which deserves a video and a live stream on its own thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Quixel

Views: 294,704

Keywords: Quixel, Mixer, Beta, Free, Megascans, PBR, Texture, Textures, Texturing, Stylized, Stylised, Materials, 3D, Sculpt, create, 3D art, ArchViz, Games, VFX, Decal, Quick, Fun, Time saving, Speed, Scans, Scan, Photogrammetry, Tutorial, Minutes, Beginner, Guide, Procedural, New, UE4, Unreal engine, games, cinematic, Halo, Master Chief, Microsoft, XBox, 343 Studio, Bungie, Halo Guardians, Halo 2, Halo CE, Combat Evolved, Xbox One

Id: F-4VmN18Nkc

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/zMyNameIsDuckyz]

I hope for a H3A that can look something like this, phenomenal video 👏🏻

[u/HerpsDerp01]

Get this guy on the Infinite Team. Beautiful work.

[u/Onion-Fart]

I hiked a valley in New Mexico that gave me Blood Gulch vibes
https://imgur.com/a/C2dyWgA

[u/[deleted]]

unreal engine good

[u/Indispence]

Now all we need is an rvb series in this