Japanese Forest

Description

This environment started out as a way to show off a tool I created that takes advantage of Unreal Engine's Real-time Virtual Textures as well as their vertex paint capabilities. It quickly grew into a calming environment that pulls from the scenery in Japan, particularly around their shrines. I wanted to utilize as many tools as I could and take the compositional techniques I've learned from 2D art as well as the technical skills I've gained getting my degree in Computer Science and Animation. The result is this environment.

Plain Landscape

Foreground Water

Atmosphere

Plain Landscape

1/8

Here is a progression of the environment from the beginning. I started painting the landscape and sculpting it out. I then added water and started with the hero objects. I added the foliage once I had the main objects and the composition down the way I wanted. I finished it with some atmospheric effects and some gobos.

This is a quick turn around of the torii gate. I tried to balance the feeling of it withstanding the test of time, but still feel as if it gets some love and care every once in a while.

The lantern was a similar difficulty. I wanted to draw on other Japanese lanterns I had seen, but still make one that was not a simple 1:1 ratio to some of the reference images I had. I also wanted it to feel a little more rundown than the torii gate itself.

Video game foliage is not an asset type that I was as used to before creating this environment. Creating these and other foliage assets gave me the opportunity to dive in deep on the necessary elements of foliage and how to optimize them for real-time gameplay.

This was the tool that I originally intended to show off in this environment. The tool takes the texture of the landscape below and object and projects it onto the object to give a more seamless transition from the the ground to the asset. I then added a world-aligned blend to the z-axis of the object so that the same material could be projected to the top of the objects allowing them to have an additional blending feature for elements like moss and dirt.