Pacific Northwest Forest

Pacific Northwest Forest

This is a project I created for Anthony Vaccaro's CGMA class, Organic Worldbuilding in Unreal Engine 5. I've made a few trips to the Pacific Northwest and wanted to create a scene that reflected its peaceful green nature. I pushed myself a lot during the class, digging deep into programs I was less familiar with like Speedtree and Substance Designer. Everything in the scene was made by me with a few small exceptions like the money plants that cover the ground the the rope coil on the boat.

Rocks

I sculpted several rocks and rubble piles for the scene as well as the cliff faces you see in the background. I created a custom rock and cliff material that you can see below in the material section. 

Foliage

All the foliage in the scene was made in Speedtree. You can see how they blend together in the asset gym as well as how they react to the lighting in the scene. Sub surface scattering was applied to the leaves and fronds to allow light to pass through and create a more authentic look. I hand sculpted the leaves for the Vine Maple and created custom fronds in Speedtree for the pine trees. 

Props

Creating the rowboat was a bit of a challenge. Especially when trying to get the hull to be the right shape and texture. I'm quite happy with the final result though. The toolbox was a last minute addition to the scene to create some additional storytelling and I think it came out quite well. Both were modeled in Maya and textured in Substance Painter.

Materials

I made a lot of progress in learning Substance Designer for this project. You can see here a collection of materials I made for the scene entirely in Substance Designer. To get the best look for the render balls, I rendered in Marmoset with ray tracing on. The ground materials like the dirt and riverbed were applied and blended through an auto-landscape shader in unreal. I also created an RVT shader so that the ground textures would blend with the rocks as they were placed in the scene.

The Process

Reference Board