top of page

UE5 Environment: Dreamy Cave

maya.png
SD.png
adobe-substance-3d-painter-icon.png
zb.png

An environment with assets modeled, textured, and rendered from scratch. Models were created using Maya, ZBrush, and TreeIt; basic textures were made by Substance Designer & Painter; the scene was set in UE5 with lighting and shading.

Demo:
Static Renders:

This scene was created inspired by my favorite game, Genshin Impact. While I love the vivid stylized art in the game, I created this scene with stylized style. Hope you like it!

 

Below are some break downs of the asset creation process:

Stones & Rocks: Maya, Substance Painter, ZBrush, UE5

  • For the stones and rocks, the basic shapes are modeled in Maya and then passed into ZBrush for low and high poly finalized models. The UVs were created in Maya with low poly models. In Substance Painter, the details of the high poly models are baked as maps to be used on the low poly models. The final rock textures were created in Substance Painter with P3 as an example.

  • In UE5, to make the stone texture better blend with the environment, I have constructed the material to blend grass material and stone material based on the surface normal of the model as shown in P4.

Tree: Maya, Substance Designer & Painter, Photoshop, TreeIt, UE5

  • The tree stem was modeled  in Maya (P1) and textured with a self-made texture in Substance Designer (p2) and finalized in Substance Painter.

  • The leaf model was generated in TreeIt and masked with a texture created in Photoshop (p3). The final material was created in UE5 (p4) with side color and wind movement added.

Shrine: Maya, Substance Designer & Painter

  • The roof texture was specifically created using Substance Designer, while the rest of the shrine body were textured using free textures and generators and  hand-painted in Substance Painter.

Torii and bridge: Maya, Substance Painter

  • The torii and bridge were textured using free textures and generators and  hand-painted in Substance Painter.

Glowing Water Shader: Substance Designer, UE5

  • The material of the glowing water was made in UE5 with some helper textures created in Substance Designer. Below are some break downs of how I created it:

    • ​Emissive: Basically plain colors, but the colors are blended based on depth fade so that water appears to be in different colors in deep and shallow zones.​

    • Normal: Used panner to pan two normal textures in different directions and blend them together. The textures are created in Substance Designer.

    • Refraction: Offset the UV of screen color by some values in the direction of the Normal.

    • Reflection: Place a reflection cube in the scene to capture the scene view as a texture, then use the reflection vector as UV. Finally, blend the reflection color and emissive color.

    • Caustic: Create a caustic texture in Substance Designer first, then use panner to pan two caustic textures in different directions. In the mean time, offset each pixel in the direction of the normal and finally blend it with reflection and emissive color.

    • Foam: Clamp [distance to nearest surface] to [0, 1] and reverse it, then multiply some factor related to sine(time). In the mean time, expose control variables to this factor so that I could further adjust how the foam would look like, such as speed, distance, and intensity of the foam.

    • Glow: In addition to the basic foam, I have created a glitter texture in Substance Designer, use the same trick to pan two textures in the different directions, and mask it to the basic foam and add some glowing factors to create the glittered glowing foam.

bottom of page