So, over the past three-ish weeks I've been working on creating an evocative biome based on a real-world location. The location is a beech tree forest at the base of Mt. Fuji and the emotion I've hoped it conveys is calmness. I have a lot more in-progress shots than I usually do on this project so lemme run through how I made this in finer detail!
I'd say the project really stemmed from the day my friends and I went exploring the woods for small caves around the base of Mt. Fuji. See, when Shigeru Miyamoto was a kid, he would go and explore the caves near his home. This experience was what he wanted to convey in the original Legend of Zelda for NES. It was this day that I got to experience the closest thing to his initial experience. Although I admit it was more like Four Swords ('Cause I was with my friends, lol) The feeling was.. spectacular yet calming. It seemed the most fitting that I would try and capture how I felt that day when I got back to school for Junior Year.
I started with a simple business card-sized drawing of what I kinda wanted it to look like. To keep my drawing small I forced myself to work at actual business card size in Photoshop with no zooming allowed. Since I wanted nature to be the dominant force in the scene, the red bridge was quickly removed to make way for a more fitting idea: Every year, the spirits that protect the river leave after the river dries up and return when the snow starts to melt. To show this, I decided to add some stone spirit statues like the ones I saw around Kyoto. Although, I admit I based their silhouette design a bit closer to the stone spirit statue in Spirited Away:
From there, I went straight into Unreal Engine 4! (UE4 for short) I made a bunch of placeholder meshes that were all the correct size. Mainly I was just blocking in the scene at this stage. Just making sure that everything in the scene was the in the right place at the right size.
Now I start making the materials and actually modeling my meshes! This is like, the very first stage of that.
Awe yeah! It's starting to come along now! Just wanted to point out how herpy-derpy this shot is actually set up. It looks like how a background in a Smash Bros stage would be set up! To fake the lighting I wanted, I used a combination of emissive cards and spotlights in random places. It's all quite hilarious when ya think about it.
Awe yeah! It's looking pretty sexy! At this point, it's all final tweaking! One of my favorite super cool things I learned how to make on this project was depth-based fog that appeared in varying densities in my level! Turns out you can make some really sexy looking fog with a simple 32x32 texture and a same-sized cloud render in Photoshop when ya put it together right in cascade! Basically, you can set the texture to fade off with a Depth Fade node plugged into the opacity and then animate the particle color over life in cascade to make the different particles fade in and out! I'm-a keep this one for later projects!
Many hours later, I got the result you saw at the beginning of this post! Aaaannndd since you've actually read it this far or just happened to stop on this sentence while quickly scrolling down this page, here's a quick tracking shot showing this scene in action!
Welp, that about wraps it up for now. As Caddicarus says, if it's your birthday today then a super special happy birthday to you and unlike Caddicarus says, an epic shout out to my friends who toured Japan with me this summer: Thank you for the unforgettable trip and the unquenchable addiction I now have to Calorie Mate Blocks! What a thrill..
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