The beginning of Sauria land

After the previous post where I stated that I finally re-started building the world again, I didn't want to just leave environment as it was and move on - I knew I could do better! After all, I achieved very pretty results on the previous version of the engine before.

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PLEASE CHECK THE IMGUR POST WITH VIDEOS
(cause patreon-video isn't worth it yet)
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The Overall Issue

My original plan for UE5 of "just slapping painterly textures onto Nanite meshes" wasn't good enough - I wanted to offset the lack of detail in textures with a lot of polygons, but, despite Unreal Engine 5 advertisement, turns out, it is still quite bad for performance (or maybe I just need a better GPU and an NVME SSD, but it's too expensive).

In search of a practical use for this new wild technology, I turned to Fortnite as the only living example of Unreal Eninge 5 game thus far. I'm not a fan of the game and I despise the battle royale genre as a concept, but played it a bit for the research purposes. I used its replay system to get up close and personal with all of its trees, rocks and grass, I then extracted and datamined some assets - and It all revealed very useful metrics of how they built it all. While they use Nanite, they don't just throw an unreasonable amount of polygons and call it a day. I decided to do something similar.

First thing, I went back to our old UE4 project to fetch my previous shaders, materials and textures - but I quickly realized that everything there needed a rework, and my old way of making textures was no longer available due to Nvidia removing their plugin from Unreal that the system relied upon. So I had to re-invent the process, make it self-sufficient, and this time using open-source tools.

The Textures

To produce a lot of nice looking textures quickly I used Epic Games Megascan library. But of course, that library is full of realistic, real-life textures and scanned models - and I'm making stylized, somewhat cartoony graphics.

Previously I invented a process which used Nvidia's "Painterly" effect (which you can enable in photo-modes in a lot of games that support Nvidia Ansel). So I just had to load a texture and snap a screenshot of it - needless to say, It was very jank and slow. But this time, with photo-mode plugin being gone, I needed to re-implement that effect myself and do it properly. The "painterly" effect is properly called Directional (or anisotropic) Kuwahara filter, and here is an entertaining video explaining it: "This is the Kuwahara Filter"

I then searched and found a new open-source program for making materials and textures called Material Maker, got into their community discord and with guidance of the (very kind) author of that program was able to implement my own filter based on some open-source code. Now with that, it unlocked the unstoppable power to make anything imaginable look like it was hand-painted in matter of seconds. Even AI can't do it yet (trust me, I tried)!

With the help of the new pipeline, I processed about a hundred textures in matter of minutes - and all of them look great and fitting for the art-style.

The Shaders

Of course, just textures alone aren't enough - computer graphics needs shaders (aka the materials where those textures are applied). For that I took my previous UE4 shaders and severely upgraded them, and had to fight off a lot of issues Unreal was throwing at me (crashing, blurry textures, being out-of-VRAM).

Hopfel also brought back our old "World-Paint" system over to the new engine version, so once again I can define custom colors for individual regions on the map, which is great for art-direction and all sorts of adjustments after-the-fact. I don't need to worry about overall color palette before I make the scene - it's very powerful, relieves a lot of artistic stress off me.

Similar to Fortnite, I also made so rock meshes and landscape are seamlessly blended - no more Bethesda-like effects of "ground sticking out of the ground with mismatched textures". You can see it here on the rock, while the small pebbles aren't blended.

The Meshes

After I evaluated how meshes are made in Fortnite, I decided to significantly reduce the polygon count. Nanite is all about rendering a lot of polygons, but if you use the same tech on more "traditional" models (ones that merely have 10-20 thousand polygons), it makes it much more efficient, more than it was before.

So I had to re-make every mesh I've made for this level so far (I better re-establish new conventions early on, than having to re-do everything later). I also brought back some select meshes from UE4, with some remastering along the way.

I made gravel and grass meshes to scatter around the ground - every rock and blade of grass is actually modeled, not a flat texture sheet like in "traditional" games. Not only it's fast to produce these assets, it looks better and is more efficient for the modern GPUs to render.

I still have a lot more plants, rocks, trees, buildings, clutter models to make for this level, so it's going to be a very long process. But with Nanite now the speed of producing these assets is increased tenfold. The time that we lost on switching the engine will be made tenfold.

Sauria

Sauria is the name of the map I'm working on, it's a desert, mostly dry area (think Australia or Arizona), but will have plenty of rivers, waterfalls, geysers and hotsprings. Mostly scaly, lizard-like Dragonkin species live there, hence the name. I intent to put a bunch of coniferous vegetation here, but since I'm really bad at botany (and I have no ability to take a hike somewhere in Arizona and take reference photos) I will probably just invent a bunch of strange alien plants along the way, like those tentacle-shaped smooth cacti without needles, but definitely with needs. And yes, I plan to make them wiggle ;} .

So far I made small samples of the following regions that I can expand later:

• Your typical American rocky desert peppered with some dry shrubbery.
• Sandstone Canyons (including Grand, and small cozy ones like Antelope canyon).
• Grassy Sandbar and/or dunes.

The current maximum map size is 2x2 km - its doubtful I will be making it any bigger (as Fortnite Season 4 island is also 2x2 km - it seems it's an optimal size for the engine to handle out-of-the-box). I might need to shrink it down later though if can't fill it with interesting content by myself.

❗ I also need your ideas for locations! ❗ I haven't mentioned it yet, but every place here is supposed to represent some kink - that is a topic for an entire other post.

For now and foreseeable future, it will stay mostly empty and flat, and it will remain like that in the playable builds as well. But given time, I will be expanding it, until someday it actually becomes a dignified playable level.

I also have ideas of adding a tropical biome to this level eventually, adjacent to a sea with turquoise water and coral reefs, inspired by Avatar 2: The Way of Water and my freediving in real-life.

I hope you like the graphics of it so far, because it's very important for me to make the worlds of Dragotheria look great, sexy, and memorable (otherwise, what's the point of using Unreal Engine 5 and having high system requirements to run it?)

Next Steps

Before I can continue working on the level more, I need to figure out the metrics, sizes and dimensions for the building system. While we won't be programming a system for player-made building just yet, I want all the models to be planned ahead of time, so I can already make sure that the level is going to be compatible with building mechanics in the future (however long that might be). And with it I will also be able to start making modular pieces for constructing various places.

I already did some of that work before in our UE4 game project, so perhaps I will bring back and upgrade some of it, similarly to how I did it with the natural stuff.

And of course, for the build to be actually at least moderately interesting, we need to get the animations working again - and I still haven't made a working rig yet. I've been putting it off because it's a going to be a ridiculously complex system, especially with the requirement to animate literally an entirety of a Kama-Sutra book, but the Interspecies Dragon edition.

Please, wish me luck with that, I need it!

With lots of Dragon Love,
   - SalirethS.