Creating a quick Unreal Engine 4 Mountain Valley Scene

Quick Forest scene I put together in Unreal Engine 4. Scene took me a little over 3 hours from start to finish.
Overall I struggled quite a bit with this one. I started out with the idea of a deer overlooking the valley with a volcano at the end, river going down the center etc... Pretty early in I didn't really like how the Volcano was feeling so I removed it to focus on a more simple valley scene.
This scene was created using a combination of assets from The Kite Demo, Conifer Forest Collection, Landscape Auto Material, and a few of my own.
All music in the video is from Unreal Tournament 2004.

[@mattymatt2323]

needed something in the gap at the end canyon

[@joshuaphilip7253]

could you maybe do a tutorial on lighting, how you made the atmosphere look like that evereything

[@evilmrfrank]

I didn't do anything spectacular with the lighting, just a directional light, sky light, a few point lights to fake bounce lighting. I did however make the overall sun light very dim and add spotlights with a very small cone to pinpoint specific areas to make the lighting a bit more uneven as if clouds were blocking the lighting in an uneven/natural way :)

[@joshuaphilip7253]

thanks!

[@igornowicki29]

Dude, you are a freakin' artist!

[@Krokussify]

Serenity

[@kenny.h1]

great work as always

[@crawfordboyz8107]

this honestly looks amazing good job man

[@eyrewiut411]

would love to be able to create scenes like this!

[@mlv60]

Frank you are so damn good!! You are my role model, I've watched most of your videos I think there wasn't a video where I didn't drop my jaw, this is so fucking good I love your work! Keep it up buddy! (:

[@evilmrfrank]

Always great to hear

[@shoiko]

Its my goal to make me environments on par with your scenes. As long as i can control the fps.

[@emekartz]

Nice scene setup! And as you said, needs further lighting and color correction phase. I closely understand you about the time restrictions, these scenes are not easy to combine and takes too much time, but you're doing it well! I'm creating UE4 scenes recently on my channel and It's hard to find time for a speed level design after working long hours in a day.

[@evilmrfrank]

Yea its definitely something you have to love to be able to spend hours doing even after a long days work XD

[@emekartz]

Yeah you're absolutely right, I am counting days to begin my new speed level design series because I love it :)

[@1stvariant538]

I have no idea how i ended up on your channel,but damn u have my subscribe

[@MrAlucardDante]

Great job, as usual

[@frellinghazmot4443]

Wow.

[@twinswithunrealengine1800]

Nice work again, definatly better without that volcano good choice to alter it. :)

[@evilmrfrank]

Yea, it seemed cool in my head but turned out to be one of those things that sounded better on paper :P I think it would have worked still if I had approached the entire scene differently or even altered the volcano to look a lot better or fit better into this environment.

[@kiraiofastora5479]

Nice. Good job, love ur videos ))

[@UsielX]

time to animate the deer

[@ChimeraProd]

These rocks / mountains are amazing too! Where can I get them? Who is your rock supplier! I NEED TO KNOW!!! Amazing work

[@NodRodge]

Almost as good as minecraft!

[@StephaneCharre]

Do you use a different skysphere ?

[@evilmrfrank]

Yes it is a custom one of mine

[@StephaneCharre]

I guess those cliff rocks are self made too ?

[@ljiljankocurcic8893]

It's cool making videos and all that, but bigger art would be making gameplay optimized scene look good with limited resources where every poly counts. Making world like far cry primal with fps over 100 is art!

[@evilmrfrank]

Who said these scenes don't run well? Most of them I do run at 60-120+ FPS no problem without optimization.

[@testicularhypertrophy]

I have watched your videos for the past two years and you do amazing work. I have learned a ton by just watching these. But one thing I still can't get down is the landscape tool. The way you use it creates such natural looking landscapes, and while I have tried using real images of landscapes to try and replicate them, I lack the skill with the Landscape tool. Did you just practice and practice to get so good with it?

[@vizhique473]

Cade Mantke yeah, he knows from experience how its done, and how to manipulate the landscape to his liking. ik this is a shot in the dark (since i dont do landscape making) but you could try referring off of contour line maps, then using the smoothing and leveling tools you have available to make the landscapes from the 3D map. obviously, ull have to learn about contour maps, but theyre pretty easy to understand. im sure theyll work well for you

[@evilmrfrank]

Pretty much, just like any other area of level design/art etc, it just comes down to practicing and getting very fluent in doing it. I'll be better next year than I man now and better the year after that and so on :)

[@anonymousone9447]

Hey Great scene! I was wondering where you get the ideas for these scenes.. I know how to use the engine, I just run into walls when it comes to level design because all my ideas (if I came up with any) disapear

[@evilmrfrank]

Coming up with ideas is just like anything else, a lot of it just comes with practice.

[@archist_ue4688]

excuse me can i know your Desktop properties that you are making these levels with it ?!!

[@kodoxbiru]

cool... where i can find this software and what name ?

[@flat1ine751]

Do you copy and paste your landscape paint material from a previous project each time, or do you create a new one with each new scene?

[@evilmrfrank]

Usually yes although I have changed at times and I usually update and fix up the one I use from time to time :)

[@justzann704]

Hey Evilmrfrank, where did you get those rock assets?

[@NatesPlayzGamez]

quick question pal, how does ur pc/unreal engine not shit its pants with all dem trees? apart from that. WICKED video mate :)

[@evilmrfrank]

Most of it comes down to proper use of LOD's. I could easily have 50X this amount of trees with out a very large drop in FPS since most of the distant trees are only about 32 tris and the foliage tool batches them together so they are very few draw calls!

[@ZeroTheHunter]

Can you show me how or where know basic programing 'bout unreal engine 2.0? i want to learn how to make maps with my potato pc for my ut goty please? nice music, serenity's soundtrack is a good choice, on your next video i recommend you "rotten city" from the ucbmp :D

[@evilmrfrank]

UT GOTY actually runs on Unreal Engine 1, I don't know any tutorials for learning the programming language but Unreal Engine 1-3 all use Unreal Script for gameplay programming

[@ZeroTheHunter]

time to learn about the scripts usage, idk nothing of script programming, wish me luck and thanks for answer mer me that fast.

[@seehr]

Can i know which is this sky system? thanks! good video :)

[@evilmrfrank]

The sky I used in this is a custom one I made based off of the default sky system in UE4

[@yashovam]

i like your scenes but i dont like the x trees they make it harder to realize the graphics quality.

[@thedude2122]

hey where do you get your assets?

[@NRO14]

😊🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍

[@NicolasSilvaVasault]

how did u deleted the quads from the landscape?

[@evilmrfrank]

There is a delete tool in the landscape itself under the manage tab

[@cristiantrushin]

I know you've been asked this a lot and I am sorry, but did you get any studies or just learned it by yourself? This will help me to decide with my future career, so I will be very thankful if you answer.

[@evilmrfrank]

I am entirely self taught. If you are a self determined person I wouldn't suggest going to school to learn this as game companies don't give a crap if you have a degree, they only care how good your work is in the end.

[@cristiantrushin]

evilmrfrank Do game companies require you to create assests? As I heard there is a dedicated person for this. Thanks for the answer.

[@evilmrfrank]

There are definitely people dedicated to it but a lot of it will come down to the studio. Some studios have environment artists who mostly just make art assets while others also have them doing the full art passes on levels. Some studios will have level designers/level artists doing the art passes on the levels while using the art assets made by the environment artist. It's also not uncommon for studios to require level designers to know tools like 3ds max.

[@cristiantrushin]

evilmrfrank Well now I am gonna learn something like Blender too. Thank you, really appreciate your answer.

[@nomisgaming5122]

the question is: why are you not working on AAA games?

[@evilmrfrank]

I've been working on AAA games since 2007, I just do this for practice/fun :)

[@nomisgaming5122]

evilmrfrank omg u ansered me! and that's great!

[@mhnoni]

IMO its not as good as your other scenes .may be the color needed more tweak .

[@evilmrfrank]

I agree entirely, in the end I felt the lighting and overall coloring as you mentioned were really flat/bland :D That's a slight down side of doing these very quickly, some will be good and some not so much :P I think if I had focused on just straight up making the valley more interesting and pretty all the ways through and not focused on a giant volcano in the distance it would have turned out a bit better, I think it threw me off quite a bit in terms of scale and perspective that carried all the way through.