In the woods

It's been magic for me how vegetation for games like Horizon Zero Dawn,for instance, is created. The environment art in games has always captured my imagination but I was afraid of creating anything like that for the fear of messing it up. But we all have to start somewhere. So, I ended up learning from video tutorials by Tyler Smith and then implemented some tips in my own project.

The goals of this project were to learn SpeedTree and get a better understanding of how materials and light work inside Unreal Engine.

It all started with a single orchid flower which I sometimes could observe in the northern forests near my hometown. I used lots of photos references to figure out the way I should build it inside SpeedTree. After that I moved on to make a tree that would stand out using decals and forced meshes. The tree is my own concept but highly inspired by Neil Burnell's photography (it's a must-see). The beautiful moss material I used on the landscape, bark and stone is provided by Pete Mc Nally https://www.artstation.com/artwork/YaRKLX for free, that's a treasure! I also used some Fab assets like stones and grasses to populate the scene and save time.

Looking back on the work done I can notice lots of things that can be improved or done differently but I'm gonna leave those observations for further consideration in my future projects.