3D Environments

My class was given a brief to create a 3D environment for a game. I decided to go with a fantasy environment to keep it on-theme with the fantasy assets I created for the previous 3D modelling project. Here are some of my ideas on a mindmap, images from the internet which inspired me, and two digital sketches I created as a starting point for my scene. I decided to go for a floating island with a cave.

In Blender, I started by creating the most basic component - the mushrooms which would be inside the cave. I then used the sculpting panel to construct an imperfectly shaped cave. Following this, I created the ground of the island, and put everything together. I also added lighting ahead of time in the spots where I wanted the ground to look as if it was glowing, and also underneath the caps of the mushrooms using point lights.

Most of the textures are hand painted - the outlier being the stone texture for the cave, although I did overlay paint onto this texture to make the top of the cave look grassy. I also created a skybox in Photoshop to use in Unity with this project.

I added some post processing effects in Unity, including ambient occlusion, bloom, and anti-aliasing. Reviewing this model I would also add a slight dark vignette that is triggered when you walk through the entrance of the cave.

Although it is far from finished, given that I chose to create all of my assets hand built and textured from scratch, I am proud of this outcome, however there is a lot that I would like to improve. Firstly I think the floor looks too flat - this would not be an issue as long as you couldn't leave the ground in game, however from a perspective of seeing the model as a whole and not just from a first person player camera, I feel that this would look better if I made the floor a floating mass of rock or mud instead of just a floating plane. Secondly I do not like how the grass edges are so jagged and so harshly raised around the path, so I would try to make it a smooth shape which slopes down into the path. I would also love to add some trees and foliage, rocks, a campfire and different texture types into this environment (e.g. emission textures). I did also experiment with particle effects in this project - I created one for inside the cave which involved tiny floating light sources to illuminate the cave better, but I sadly lost this version of the file to the college computer system! So if I had more time, I would make some more particle effects to add to the inside of the cave, underneath trees as shown in the sketches, and a smoke effect for a campfire (also shown in the sketch).