
Cliffside Forest
Project Concept
The concept for Cliffside Forest is a desert environment featuring a forest close to a canyon portion of the desert. I wanted to create a part of this environment that made the player/viewer question what happened at the edge of the cliff. The props in this scene consist of a Lamp Post, Fence, Bushes, Trees, and Rocks. I also wanted to include a focal point in the main shot of this project with the blue light emitting from inside the rocks.
Techniques
For this project, I first began by creating a "white-box" environment to plan out the location of the props and terrain. After making a mockup of the environment, I began to create each prop in Autodesk Maya. I created the Lamp Post and Fencing first, there are three different variations of fencing used in this project. Next, I made the Rocks, Trees, and Bushes. For both the Bushes and Trees, I used Xgen to generate individual leaf planes to create even-looking foliage. I UV'd all of the props and exported them using an FBX file type.
I imported the FBX files into Adobe Substance Painter and began to texture the props. The texturing for this project is a simple painterly style with light depth and simple colors. I created tiling textures for the terrain as well as the underlying bush texture. I also used emissive texturing to create the glowing Lamp Posts. I exported all the textures from Substance Painter and imported the props and textures into Unity3D. Following the white-box I created before, the props were placed in their respective positions and the textures were applied to them. I altered the skybox light to create a sunset scene and I added a point light in between the rocks to create the focal point for the main shot.
Conclusion
This project was interesting to create because of the painterly texture style used for the terrain and bushes/trees. It was also fun to create the bushes/trees by experimenting with Xgen to make the individual leaves. If I were to revisit this project, I would alter the geometry of the rocks to make them a little smoother and attempt to develop the story/composition more.