This is a work in progress scene.

I wanted to get some practice with exterior environments that use modular pieces. The end goal is to have a pack of assets that can be used to create a variety of forest scenes.

I started out by sculpting the landscape in Unreal engine and creating a rough blockout of trees that would be in the direct line of the camera. This blockout also allowed me to work on the lighting and create something that fit the aesthetic I was aiming for. After that I created the two variations of trees in speed tree, one being a red wood and the other being a generic conifer. I then created four variations of rocks that I could reuse at different rotations.

I replaced the blockout trees and painted in the rest with the foliage editor, giving them variation in size and rotation.

I then focused on the materials, utilizing the megascans library for the snow, wood, and rocks. I created a landscape material that I could paint on, allowing me to create paths and variations in the snow. I modified the base speedtree material and created a new material for the rocks in order to have a blend parameter for snow. This allowed me to have different levels of snow, controlled by material instances, that could be changed on the fly.

The most recent addition has been the start of the log cabin. For this I started with a 5x5 stack of cylinders in Maya which I combined and moved into ZBrush. I sculpted them to have some wear, as well as to create slight variations/texture. Once completed I combined them within ZBrush so they would have no gap between them, turning them into one continuous mesh. Once completed I exported the low-poly version back to Maya and saved the high-poly version.

In Maya I cleaned up the topology of the low-poly and unfolded the UVs. This then allowed me to move both the low-poly and high-poly into Substance Painter and bake the high onto the low. I exported these textures and moved the low-poly wall, baked textures, and megascans wood textures into Unreal.

In Unreal I created a material that combined the normal map and ambient occlusion of both the tileable texture and baked texture. I then added parameters to control roughness as well as the ability, like the trees, to control the level of snow.

Next i will be working on completing more modular pieces for the cabin, creating variation on the cabin using vertex painting, and creating/adding props to create a more realistic scene.

Maya

ZBrush

Substance Painter

SpeedTree

Unreal Engine 5