Had a couple of hours today and got a bunch of stuff done! Blocked out some cliffs with some scanned data, did a quick zbrush sculpt for a merger, baked a mask and normals for the material blending in the shader and added some additional stuff like a custom triplanar in the master shader, detail normals for the mergers and camera divided texture sizes on the terrain layers for better readability far away. 

Overall I think I got some good angles but the large cliffs look pretty garbage right now, might do a quick sculpt pass on that too and blend with the scanned textures like I did with the merger. I def need some more readability on those silhouttes. 

  After Kupsers comment (sadly couldn't add images in the comments):

Current Normal blending, not very pretty normal info, looks veiny. I want the wispy sand look instead. Thought I'd do a new info pass in Houdini to get better slope informaiton :) ....oooor (next image)

Maybe blending in these normals in the terrain from www.textures.com based on a baked mask or something.

I could use fake cloud shadows or ambient FX with moving wispy sand to break up the terrain, but I'm guessing the latter won't fit well with a beach because of how the sand would be packed so close to the ocean. 

Short on time today again, so I started doing some base meshes to warm up for bashing later on. No real angles on the formation yet, so the composition looks pretty garbage. More misses than hits today tbh. I'll hopefully solve that once I start bashing it together. 

Pivoting the beach for now for a quick material testing, will finish the other scene after this one. Fixed the sand textures, blocked out some rocks, baked some backdrop terrains and the hero terrain in houdini. Used a lattice deformer to shape the beach instead of adjusting the height for better control. Used Joakim Stigsson HDRI as a placeholder sky. Tried baking out Houdini flip fluids foam together with an ocean but might need to rent a proper renderer for better results. I have very little experience with flip fluids inside of UE4 :/

Had to make a Edge Decal shader. Normal map + Mask texture: Grunge+Curvature+AO+Opacity

Placeholder Textures for now, color grunge needs tweaking.

Z-sculpt

Did some quick wood sculpting, baked it and started making the masks in painter. I'll try out the masks in the scene shaders on sunday, that's why the values are cranked up. They'll work as multiplyers and overlays.  

Only had like an hour to spare today, so I blocked out and UV'd some stuff like windows, roof, wooden structures. I also brought in some textures I bashed together a while back in Designer and modified them to be more generic for better usuability across the scene. The shader and decals will bring a whole lot more nuances to the textures in the end. 

Gif posts below. Finished the second iteration on the Trim Shader, nothing pretty yet. It is two base textures and two more additional for a Material blend. I'm using the AO and Edge masks for potential damaging and highlights with a color multiply'er, not polished yet. Two different sets of UV coordinates for better tiling between the base and whats on top, i.e. Wood, Metal etc. It's good enough for a second iteration though, I could probably do some channel adjustments later on for additional masks. Needless to say, all textures are placeholder part from the trim normal map and some plaster. I'm going to have to do some sculpting soon for a better natural trim. After that I'll start fleshing out the scene with trimmed props and modules. Then there's a bunch of textures that need to be made. 

Got the first Trims in order yesterday for the UE4 scene, nothing complicated. AO bake was so-so, so I'll have to do a rebake of that, easy fix though. Plenty of Base normal shapes with easy values I can convert to whatever material I need. I'll probably do a concrete and wood trim set too later this week. Values and Color are placeholder. My prop shader will drive most of the values I need based on a few masks from Painter, hopefully I'll only need two 2k textures for the finished trim. 

Made some quick work on the old fuse box yesterday evening. I'll do a couple of hinges and some more cords later this week, then I'll bake what needs baking and trim the rest. 

Got a hefty amount of work done on sunday evening. Mashed together some of my old shaders and textures (Megascans) on some blockout meshes Some hit and misses on the texturing right now, I prob need a second iteration on the lighting to validate some textures like the stone wall which is super placeholder, I just jammed textures together in Mixer, they don't really make any sense right now... Wood stuff is placeholder. Haven't opted anything yet and doubt I will tbh.. I'm just trying to keep the momentum on the environment at this point. I might opt once I'm done with the first complete pass on the environment. 

I got one master shader for props with Pixel depth options. One Master for Terrain and one Layered Master for vertex painting modules and such.

 There's a combination of height and custom mask lerps for the texture transition in the vertex paint which gave me a better result for the plaster blending. Got inspired to change my blending when looking at Joakim Stigssons desert scene, his results are really impressive. and well worth buying for workflow studying https://www.artstation.com/artwork/1Pr48 

Gonna have to do some trims and sculpts soon, but need to plan a bit more before I start to commit.