Natural Cave Pool - Unreal Engine 4

Описание: Objective:

Natural Cave Pool created in Unreal Engine 4.

In this project, I created all the assets seen within the scene such as the models, textures, particle systems, as well as whiteboxing, lighting and rendering.

Goals:
Create a living, organic scene in Unreal Engine 4
Improve sculpting and retopology skills
Create a cohesive and interesting scene
Improve Technical Artist Skills such as Materials, Material Functions, Lighting

Tools:
Autodesk Maya
Substance Painter
Substance Designer
Photoshop
Unreal Engine
ZBrush
Tree-It

References:

Used various images on Google images as reference for scene.

Used Ben Cloward’s UE4 Material 101 tutorials as reference when creating the water material and water depth in my scene.

Process:

My process began by researching various images of cave pools, islands, lagoons, and oases to give myself options to use as references for when I began building the scene.

From there, I began a list of assets required, which expanded throughout the project’s development, as well as a list of technical assets, such as particle systems, textures, blueprints and PBR materials.

I spent a lot of time with developing materials for the scene, to optimize performance, and provide considerable variety to the assets I was creating. This project also provided me the opportunity to improve my sculpting skills and working with organic models and retopology.

Lighting was an interesting challenge as I had to properly place texture seams on my meshes in order to avoid these artifacts being seen by the viewer. I also worked with dynamic lighting in this scene to provide realism to the moving foliage and objects in the scene. I used post-processing volumes and lighting in order to dictate the mood of the scene.