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