Jake is my personal pet project. I use this project to learn new techniques, and I've made some good progress over time. I first started working on the project with the 4.6 build of UE4, and I've continued to update it ever since. Somewhere around version 4.10 I decided to completely scrap the old project and start all over. I didn't like the direction of the original, which had very small islands, portals, and very little space to work with. Now, it has taken a life of its own.
I'll get into the details of the character Jake and the rest of the gameplay later. For now, you can just enjoy this gorgeous WIP shot of the windmill section in this game.
And now the technical details: The grass and flowers are procedurally generated using UE4's grass tool, developed for the Kite Demo. It uses the landscape's surface information to position the grass. Unfortunately, the flowers and grass must be combined together, so you cannot have multiple different kinds of grass layers with different flowers.
The grass and flowers blow in the wind based off of some combined normal maps that pan over the surface (via world position mapping). Normal maps contain information in a -1:1 range. The normal maps are then converted from local space to world space to determine the actual normals and positioning of the meshes. This saves a lot of shader instructions because we use textures instead of expensive procedural methods or vertex normal tangents to determine the normals and positioning, and the same code feeds both. It's relatively easy to set up, too. However, this method is not to be confused with tessellation as tessellation does not support local space transforms. The object vertices are the only ones needed for the animation.
The rope fence is one of my favorite personal touches and details in this project. The project looked very barren without some environmental aspect to it, but I needed something non-invasive to really blend in with the landscape. Then I recalled Super Mario Sunshine's elastic ropes. My ropes do sway in the breeze with vertex animation, again using local transform to swing the ropes from side to side. The post itself is a custom Blueprint where I can select the next post in sequence and the rope is spawned automatically. Using look at rotation, I can spawn the ropes with the right rotation and scale them to the right length. A squareish shape for the rope actually aids in the gameplay (flat top side is obviously up) and also in the vertex count. A single rope only has 160 vertices.
The windmills themselves have the Perfect Tile System assets applied, and they also have parallax occlusion mapping on them. The modeling is very basic, but I take good care of my surface materials to make sure it looks right in the scene. The cloth uses the two-sided shader. The wood is opaque. Shadows are cast on the cloth, and the cloth casts shadows as well.
The sky is a custom shader I made myself that takes normals into account for the clouds. It's entirely unlit, but I use light vector information to model shading in the clouds. The horizon is much brighter than the zenith, giving a sense of atmosphere in the distance and better contrast with the clouds up above.