Whimsical Forest

Whimsical Forest

Whimsical Forest was created for my personal progression of my Unreal Engine 5, Substance Designer, Blender, & TreeIt skillsets. This allowed for me to improve my knowledge on foliage, material building, Niagara & much more! I was inspired with the environments throughout Genshin Impact with the unique colors of vegetation & stylised art style. 

Breakdown

Creating the foliage was a new learning experience as I mixed Photoshop & Blender together. Drawing the flowers allowed for me to cut the shapes out & morph into flowers having depth. I was inspired by four different types of flowers; a lavender, daffodil, rudbeckia & a blue flax with green shades blocked out for the stems & leaves. I wanted to have a different colored flowers for different heights & allowing for colors to pop out within the grass foliage.

I made the grass to reflect the shade of the landscape material & the material allows for it to have a wind ripple, which I made the texture using Photoshop.

Making the trees was very fun as I used TreeIt to create the base, branches and leaf placement. The alpha mask for the leaves was created on photoshop where I scattered a single type of leave across an image. I only did the alpha mask so I wouldn't be limited for colors & can color it through UE5. When making the leaves material on UE5, I also applied an emission to give the magical story. The bark is a simple one made with Substance Designer & also edited this on UE5 materials to create an alignment blend with the height of the branch as seen on the trees.