Ruins In The Water

Software

• Blender: For modeling and retopologizing prop assets in my scene.
• Unreal Engine 5.1: The rendering engine I used. SpeedTree This was used for most of the foliage creation.
• WorldMachine: To refine and add more realistic details to my terrain.
• RizomUV: I used this for all my UV work.
• Substance Designer: For creating tileable textures, mainly for the broken wood material I used on my boat and the rusted metal material for the ruined machine.
• Substance Painter: Used for texturing and baking, like some small assets on the ruined machine and the boat.
• Quixel Megascans: Textures for all the foliage and landscape, as well as some trunk and cliff assets used in the scene.
• PureRef: Where I stored all my references.

Goals

This is my Intermediate final project at TTO. It was a huge challenge for me, but I also learned a lot and had great fun working on it.

I found Xiangzhao Xi’s “Ruins in the Water” concept and fell in love with it. The beautiful lighting and the atmosphere look amazing!
Also, this time I want to learn some new techniques for foliage creation, as well as gain some practice in texturing in different situations. So here’s where my journey gets started.

References

I used PureRef for reference gathering. It’s really powerful and easy to use.
I mainly searched for references based on real-life photos since I want to achieve a realistic look for my scene as well.

Blockout and Modelling

I start off by blocking out the whole scene inside Unreal Engine. By using the preset characters inside UE, I can easily get a sense of the scale of the scene.
Moreover, I can control the character to walk around and view everything from the player’s perspective all the time.

I modeled all the main assets inside Blender, including the huge machine and the small boat.

I’d like to mention how I deal with my landscape at this stage.

First, I do the rough sculpting inside Unreal Engine and then export the height map to World Machine to add more details. World Machine is a very powerful software for landscape generation.

With just a few simple adjustments to noise and erosion, I can make my terrain look much better. Later on, I can further refine it inside Unreal, taking into account the overall scene from different perspectives.

Foliage Creation Techniques

To learn a more advanced approach to foliage creation, I challenged myself to create 90% of the foliage assets using SpeedTree.

I dedicated a lot of effort to teaching myself this new software by searching for numerous online tutorials.
However, I discovered that I immensely enjoy the process of creating foliage in a procedural and non-destructive manner. Additionally, I obtained all the foliage textures from Megascan.

And I’d like to share a small trick for making the foliage in my scene wave in the wind. I downloaded some lotus leaf assets from Quixel Bridge and learned from its master material.
I found that it used world position offset to fake the wind-waving effect, so I also tried to use this method on my own foliage.

Texturing and Materials

This time, I actually experienced many different methods of texturing inside UE5. The boat is textured following the traditional high-to-low baking workflow.
Although I tried to create the painted broken wood material inside Substance Designer, I still primarily used hand-painted texturing in Substance Painter.

However, the ruined machine is too large to texture inside Substance Painter.

So I used a vertex painting tool with four different tillable materials – three for painted metal and rust, and one for the moss on top.

Also, I downloaded five different materials from Quixel Bridge about the landscape.

This includes rock ground and sand cliffs for the mountain part, fallen leaves, and moss ground for the lands, and moss swamp for the lake’s edge.
Then, I created the landscape blend material below to paint inside Unreal Engine.

Lighting and Rendering

Since the inclusion of Lumen in Unreal Engine, lighting has become a lot easier. I have dedicated a significant amount of time to growing my plants, utilizing both brush painting and manual placement techniques. I have also made an effort to refine all the details from various angles.

Although adjusting all the details and finalizing the entire scene was time-consuming, it was immensely satisfying to gradually bring the whole composition to life. The end result was truly worth every effort.

Conclusion

The entire project period lasted four weeks. It was a huge challenge for me, but I also learned a lot and had great fun working on it.

Thanks to my supervisor, Toy E, and my kind classmates who gave me a lot of support and helpful advice. Thank you to GamesArtist for giving me the opportunity to share what I have learned. And thank you all for taking the time to read through this!