Cliffwood Village
This project is a concrete realization of the ideal space that I had envisioned in my mind. I had been wanting to create something like a game stage where you can actually walk around, so I spent eight months working on it using UE5.1 as my graduation project.
Cliffwood Village
Since it is a fantasy, I am not setting it in a specific country or a specific place, but I was inspired mainly by Switzerland because of its climate and topography. The Swiss landscape is incredibly enchanting and beautiful, and it is one of those countries that I definitely want to visit someday.
In the near future, when VR with graphics so realistic that it will look like reality becomes possible, I would like to create various worlds and live in them. I am very much looking forward to it.
Camera
I wanted to create a video with a first-person perspective, so I used a virtual camera to achieve that. Since I didn't have a VR headset, I used an iPhone for recording. I modified smartphone VR goggles so that I could directly view the iPhone screen.
River
The river water was created using a Houdini simulation.
The water is exported as alembic and imported into UE as Geometry Cache.
The base material is single layer water, and the vorticity attribute is used to create the vertex color to represent the difference in color due to the flow of water.
WhiteWater is imported as VAT.
These water data are very heavy to use in realtime rendering, but we chose to sacrifice performance this time because we wanted to pursue realistic water representation.
Sky Exposure
We wanted to reproduce the white sky beyond the dynamic range of the camera when exposed to dark areas, which is common in videos shot with real video cameras and smartphones, so we placed a sphere in the sky with an emissive material applied to it with an EyeAdaptation node connected to Opacity.
While I have made several environment art works in the past, this was the first time I used the unreal engine in earnest, and I was surprised at Nanite's amazing processing power and the beauty of the Lumen lighting.
For this project, we prioritized only the visual quality of the game, so the real-time rendering performance dropped to about 30 FPS in FHD play at RTX3090. However, from now on, as a professional working in the game industry, I will strive not only for visual quality, but also to create a comfortable playing environment.
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