Forest

Kelly Clayton
Aug 1, 2022
3 min read

Updated: Aug 18, 2022

Forest - The Developement (6A, 6B, 6C)

Concept Development
Staging and Lighting
References

1. Concept Development

I started by looking at my animatic and colour from last semester.

Then started roughly blocking out the environment. Originally this environment was blocked out in Maya so this is the first time its seen Unreal Engine. Once it was blocked out, I took screenshots and brought it back into Photoshop.

This was basically for me to figure out how to fill the space. Very very roughly point out to myself, oh I want roots here, maybe a fallen big log in the foreground of 6B. Just sorts by brain out a little. I didn't do 6C.

2. Staging and Lighting

6A Blocked

Working on this environment is like working on Village as it uses a similar palette. This means I didn't need to change much within my assets.

I started by building out shapes of the roots using TreeIt and put in some rocks.

For lighting, I played with my exponential fog and directional light to get stronger rays. And much like Village, I used a collection of upside-down trees as light blockers which just adds more interest to the shadows for the scene. I also added my fog planes in the background to fake depth in the trees.

Though in my colour concepts the scene is blue, it was originally meant to be a purple scene. The middle ground between the red from the scene (Sol and Mani) before and blue in Village. So, I’m trying to bring that back. The scene also felt very desaturated so played within the colour grade settings on my post process.

Now it looks a little too insane.

To fix this I just deleted my post process and started again with the lighting.

No Post Processing Volume

I pulled the colours towards a colder blue/purple to reflect the dense forest - little sunlight shining through.

I next put in grass that I had made previously (here) to fill up the scene more which was working pretty well.

To fake depth in the scene I duplicated my grass material and clump for the foreground and the background to make a darker type. I used this technique on Village for the bushes.

Result

As I kept building out the environment, I brought back in the Ivy to add more texture to the trees. I also deleted the purple bushes for now as they became overwhelming but added them in again later.

Ivy on trees

I continued building the scene along into 6B and into 6C, developing them all together.

Anything that I do in 6A or 6C can directly effect 6B, so I continuously flipped between my cameras. I think this helped to build a stronger overall scene too.

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I pushed scene 6B over a bit further so there would be less overlap with 6A. This also meant that I had to push over 6C but that was easy to do.

I next built out the indirect lighting for each scene for the bounce light for the bounce light of the glowing orbs. Also brightening up some really dark shadows. I added an outer ring to each of the suns to match my concept for 5A (the scene before).

I then found out that one of my rocks is actually magical and can determine the light shading on my grass. Which I had a play with then moved it out of frame but kept the light shading.

I continued building out scene into 6B and 6C. Making it so that I can pan between all scenes and render out whichever part I needed.

To finish off, I vertex painted some green on some of the trees and pushed the shader values further.

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After finishing the wolf asset, I could implement it into the scene for 6C.