Modular Environment Creation pt. 3

Before I began sculpting, I started gathering references of stylized rocks on a pureref board, shown here:



Using various brushes such as clay buildup, trim dynamic, trim adaptive, orb flatten, and orb pinch, I sculpted my stone. I think if I had to point out one major flaw in the process, my stone came out a lot more rounder and softer than I had originally intended, and should've been made sharper overall. Here are my final pieces in Zbrush:



Moving onto exporting my meshes from Zbrush... I had some issues when exporting directly to Unreal from Zbrush, as the meshes imported in incredibly tiny, almost invisible. Noting that there was a scaling issue, I instead took the finalized and decimated sculpts back into Maya to scale back up to their proper sizes, freezing transforms after I was done. Then, I imported my blocks into Unreal. Once my meshes were at their proper scale in Unreal, I began working with the sequencer and cinematic cameras in Unreal, setting up two to take shots with. I also set up a fade track to fade between the two, and moved their positions/rotations to set up my shots. In addition, I set up the level blueprint to play the sequence on startup, and then let the player play through once the enter key was pressed.

After I finalized everything I wanted in my sequencer, I moved onto creating the settings for the movie render queue, following the settings in the video.



Before rendering everything out, I decided I would do some of the bonus content, and went through creating the grid pattern and circular pattern with my stone.





Then, it was time to create the grass in the scene. I actually deviated from the main video for this part, choosing to follow a tutorial by Viktoriia Zavhorodnia instead. I have looked at this tutorial a few times, so the process went pretty fast. Once the grass was finished, I painted it in using the foliage brush.





The last part of the bonus video I chose to do was the rocks. I had actually not placed rocks using physics simulations before, so I was curious to try this method out. Previously I've used the foliage brush to place rocks, but that can be tedious.



Wrapping everything up, I adjusted my blueprints for the stone grid, adding rotation and height variation to my blocks to make everything look more unique/less repetitive. I also added additional structures on top of the one I had already built, adding to the visual interest rather than making things look flat on top. Following up on the critique about light sources from the previous week, I created lanterns to add as light sources on the inside of my structure.

Here are my final shots and video render!