Tulip Fields
Peaceful tulip fields. This started out larger and more realistic, but I wasn't liking the composition so I restarted it with more of a focus on the windmill, the colour in the scene, and adding as much motion as possible.
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- Tech Stuff -
- The tulip fields are using Unreal's PCG system to populate tulips along splines. They trace to the landscape so it's incredibly easy to adjust entire rows or adjust the landscape and have everything fix itself magically. At first it felt like overkill, but I ended up finessing the row positions several million times so I probably saved some time overall. I also added exclusion volumes that remove the tulips to clear areas around the windmills and structures. Everything else is hand placed to control the composition as well as possible.
- The clouds are using Unreal's volumetric clouds and sky atmosphere. I had never used them much before, they're really nice for simpler or stylized shapes. One of the default blueprints in the system writes the cloud positions to a render target, and then volume textures do all the nice noise and movement. I added regular fog planes (just a panning noise texture basically) in the foreground for depth, and a few in the background to fake negative space in the volumetric clouds.
- The windmill rotates via world position offset in the material, same with the little wind cards around the edges of the blades. I preferred this over a regular animation because it's constantly playing in the viewport, so it's nice to have everything always in motion to get a feel for the overall scene. The clothesline is similar, just WPO noise and sine waves.
- The tulip rows change colour over time, basically just panning a gradient in world space over each row which cycles between three colours. This happens in the background distant hills too via a slightly different setup since the background hill is just a single mesh/texture and not actual tulip meshes.
- The fence spline is a spline. It randomly chooses one of three meshes per segment, but sadly is not using PCG.
If you've read this far, hello! I wrote an article for Games Artist that breaks down the scene further, going into more detail about the process if you're interested in that sort of thing: https://gamesartist.co.uk/tulip-fields/
The tulip PCG spline with a few parameters for density and size.
More PCG fun, setting up volumes that remove instances to easily and non-destructively clear areas around the windmills.
This is the first version of the scene, much larger and more focused on maximizing the PCG tulip fields. I disliked the composition and tried to save it a few times before restarting it entirely.
A greyscale paintover that I did to try and salvage the scene when I didn't like the direction of it. In the end I lowered the camera and put the main windmill on the top of a hill, and having the viewer look up at the windmill made all the difference.