Forest

Environment Art

Development

Forest is a short film I created as part of my Major project at Ulster University. The Project was a solo project I created from start to finish. Aimee Kirkham Priester Created some Character Animation for the project and I downloaded a few VFX assets form the Unreal Store Like fire. Other than that, the story, design, concepts, Modelling, Texturing, Lighting and Editing were all done by myself. The Project really allowed me to create a piece using all aspects of production from start to finish.

9 Month Solo Project
Rendered in Unreal Engine
Maya, Substance, Zbrush, Speedtree, Adobe Suite.

Story

Man Design

Boy Design

Some Progression Shots

Dragon Fly Shot

Water Exit Shot

Fallen Tree Shot

Ending Shot

Technical

Many of the assets where created using alphas with paint brush textures, with a vertex animation.

The Space door Animated material I created for the level. creating the large space door where the ship enters was also a fun challenge that involved masking between multiple tiled materials.

Grass

Left: Textures and lighting Right: Shader Complexity

For the grass I created an optimized material and made use of geometry over transparency to allow for thousands of clumps to be on screen at once.

The grass uses vertex animation and has world space textures to adjust colour variation over a large distance

I used animated textures and brush alphas for the dragonfly

I created a fresnel effect that hides the brush cards when viewing them from a 90 degree angle

unbaked card vertex normal
baked Normals with improved card viewing angles
Shell I used to bake the vertex nromals

I baked the veretex normals from the rocks on to the alpha cards. this prevented that hard edge on the cards noticeable in the fist image when viewing the cards at a an angle.

above are some development shots of the first shot in the film.

Exiting the water

I created a gradient for the stimulation properties in marvellous designer. This allowed me to make the clothes simulate both as wet and dry. The we clothes cling to the surface of the character more and have more weight and flexibility to the dry parts of the clothes.