Jungle Paradise

Rock Photogrammetry Sketchfab: https://skfb.ly/6w6SW

I always wanted to learn about foliage as it was something I had never touched upon in my 3D journey. For this project I decided to focus solely on a natural scene.

I wanted to create a beautiful and inviting lagoon that feels as if you could just jump in the refreshing water.

I knew that I wanted to focus on foliage but I also wanted to look into creating water shaders, and waterfall effects. It was certainly an interesting experience trying to get the colour, depth, and refraction I wanted from the water.

For the foliage I looked at a lot of work by Naughty Dog in Uncharted 4 because they have quite a hyper-realistic artstyle which in some cases can look a lot more vibrant and colourful than real life. This paradise-esque look was also something I wanted to achieve in my work, as trying to make something 100% realistic just isn't as fun or visually appealing to me.

Creating the actual foliage wasn't too difficult, I experiemented with both sculpting and texturing plants by hand, and simply using photographs I had taken and creating foliage from them. I found that quite often the hardest part was getting the foliage to look right in engine. One of the techniques that really helped me with this was the Two-Sided Sign node in UE4 which correctly flipped the normal map for my two sided foliage assets.

For the rocks, and some tree trunks I used photogrammetry because it's an up and coming, and very desirable technique that I see a lot of companies looking for candidates to have experience in. Using photogrammetry gave me incredibly detailed results that were far more than I could of hoped to achieve manually using alternative methods given the same time-frame.

For the lighting I again wanted to create a paradise/heavenly look with a lot of godrays so I looked into using volumetric fog in UE4. Volumetric fog is a very powerful aesthetic effect but I learnt that it's also very easy to overdo it and blow your scene out with it.

All in all I'm really happy with the way this scene turned out and I learnt a tonne, not just about foliage, but about photogrammetry, lighting, and composition as well. If I had more time to work on this I would love to add in some different species of plants and trees to the scene. Perhaps some bamboo, banana trees, and some colourful flowers to bring some different colours into my scene.