Blue Planet Monster Cave
This scene depicts a predators cave on a foreign blue planet. It has a desert like environment with few vegetations, but the ones that grow have a bioluminescent property, so they glow in the dark. I tried to improve my composition skills along with getting better at working with high quality megascan asssts. I
Update - 15 May 2021
Final Update
In this project, I challenged myself to improve my composition skills using megascan assets and some assets made by myself. The end goal was to create a foreign land with a vivid look but using a limited set of assets. Because of my familiarity with the software, I used Blender to create the whole scene, however I faced many limitations while finishing off the project. I know now that a realtime game engine like Unreal or Unity would handle this type of project better than Blender.
I am satisfied with the look and feel of this project, and the scene adequately tells the story of the alien planet with an apex predator. I hope to challenge myself with new projects with everything I have learned till now, for now, this is my final scene for the Realtime Environment challenge.
Update - 15 May 2021
Finishing Touches
Starry Sky
I initially thought of using an HDRI for the sky background, but instead found a way of recreating stars with Blender's shader nodes. In this setup, I use the Generated texture co-ordinate of the World shader to project a Voronoi texture around the scene. This texture can then be turned into stars by scaling it down and using a color ramp to shrink the white part of the texture.
Adding Story
After arranging and rearranging assets to fit the composition and playing with different scene color pallettes, the scene needed a story. I initially thought of the scene as a watering hole in the wild where animals came to drink water. Then, there was the cave as a focal point of the scene, so I decided to hint at a predator living in the cave. To do that, I created blood splatters on the ground and the pond using masks, I then blended the mask the create the blood spatters seen on the pond and the ground leading upto the cave.
Update - 15 May 2021
Trees and Foliage
Mtree Addon
I used an addon called Mtree for Blender to make procedural trees. It uses a curve based system to generate trunk and branches, and it can also take a custom mesh to create leaves. I modeled simple leaf mesh to scatter around the tree. This approach didn't really work for making real looking foliage, but it was good enough to populate the scene, since the shape of the tree looked natural.
Megascans Foliage
I used two main megascan assets, a vine mesh and a sea plant mesh. Since the main color scheme of the rocks and ground was blue grey, the day scene looked boring. So, I opted for a night scene lit by illuminating plants. The diffuse colors of the foliage were changed to match the color schemes of the scene. The plant meshes have emission strength of 1 with diffuse colors plugged into Emission color in Principled BSDF shader. Blender's real time engine, Eevee doesn't do well to light the scene with just the Emission shader unlike the Cycles engine, so I added small point lights around the vines, trees and smaller foliage with teal blue and purple color schemes.
Update - 15 May 2021
Carcass Bone Progress
I started the bone with simple polygonal modeling for getting the shape and angle right. I had blocked out the bone initially so I had the idea of the scale and position of the bones in my scene. I then subdivided the bone model and sculpted on the base to give it a more organic and less faceted look.
Texturing began with a simple uv-unwrapping. At first I remeshed the sculpted bone with quadrilateral remeshing option that comes with Blender by default. It gave me a low resolution mesh which I unwrapped in blender. I exported the low res mesh and the high res sculpt as objs and baked normal maps in Substance Painter. The albedo was created with simple noise masks and variation in values of the main base color. I also added cracks in the texturing process that were baked in the normal maps.
Later in the process of creating the scene, I changed the mood and lighting of the scene. I also changed the texture colors of most of the rock assets to create a blue grey look. So, I adjusted the textures of the bones using a combination of noise textures and position texture coordinates to make the bone look like it had blue algae growing on it as it sits on a small pond. I also used the mask used to create the blue patches to make a roughness mask to give it a wet shiny look.
In the end, I duplicated this single mesh into 6 different bones and adjusted the rotation and scale to create the rib carcass on the pond.
Update - 3 Apr 2021
I went back to the blockouts to create a different composition for the scene. The heavy foliage didn't work well with the Blender particle system. So, I repurposed the original concept to fit a barren canyon like space. I am trying to create a cave as a focal point of the scene, however using megascan assets to block out the cave didn't work. I am planning on hand sculpting a cave entrance for the scene. I also need to replace the low res cliff meshes with higher res ones as the lack of detail is obvious.
Update - 23 Mar 2021
I used a single cliff asset to blockout the cliffs above the pond. Then to populate the foreground, I have added two type of plants using hair particle system on a plane. The plane for particle system is different from the ground plane with textures.
Things to do now: #Texture blending between the assets. #Find rock assets and arrange them to create a natural looking cliff. #Add vegetation above the pond. # Add a carcass dipped in the pond.
Update - 22 Mar 2021
I made a blockout of the scene using Blender and basic shapes. Icospheres were used to represent rocks and a small cliff above the pond. I added a plane with displacement to represent water. A cube of 2m height was used as a human scale reference. Next steps would include shortlisting assets required for the scene. I am browsing through plant assets and rock assets from megascans and selecting the ones that fit the scene.
Update - 19 Mar 2021
I made a quick blockout sketch for the scene I am going to create. The scene is going to include a watering hole in a foreign planet that is capable of sustaining earth like life forms.
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