Stylized Forest
The Stylized Forest was a project I took on as an attempt to learn what it takes to create a stylized environment from scratch. I only used assets I created myself, aside from the terrain which was generated with Unreal Engine 5's terrain tool.
Beauty Shots
This is a stylized forest scene I created using Unreal Engine 5 as my final project for Modeling II. In order to create this scene I followed a multiple guides on creating various different elements seen within a stylized nature scene, including trees, rocks, grass, water, and logs, each maintaining a stylized art style. The programs I used to create these props were Maya and Blender for modeling, ZBrush and Blender for sculpting, Substance Painter for textures and baking, Photoshop for the leaf texture, and TreeIt for the tree model.
Final Assets
The tree and grass meshes were the simplest to create for the scene, and I am quite proud of the results I achieved. For the tree, I used TreeIt to quickly create a tree trunk and alphacards for its leaves, afterwards taking it into ZBrush to sculpt additional grooves and give the tree a more stylized look. For the lowpoly mesh, I used ZBrush's decimation master functionality to quickly create one that kept most of my original sculpt's details, then took everything into Maya for quick UVs and Substance for textures. To achieve the look I wanted for my stylized leaves, I followed a tutorial by Viktoriia Zavhorodnia that showed the entire process of making their textures and a shader that makes them move and gives slight color variations to them; The leaf texture was created in Photoshop by making leaf shapes with the shape tool, arranging it in a circular pattern, and then giving it a black background so that Unreal could recognize it as an opacity mask.
Moving on to the grass, I followed another tutorial by Viktoriia Zavhorodnia in which I just took a plane, scaled it down to a rectangle, merged both ends, and then duplicated and arranged several blades to make a grass patch. After merging all the blades and using auto UVs, I also made sure to make both sides of the grass blade's vertex normals to 1 in the y axis, and 0 in both the x and z axis so that both sides of the grass showed texture. After bringing the mesh into unreal I followed Viktoriia's video again to get the shader and terrain painting set-up.
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For the rock and log meshes, I sculpted on prefab shapes in ZBrush to get the desired look I wanted for them. The rock I followed the tutorial series on making stylized environments by Tyler Smith, and the log I followed the process that I found by following along to a YouTube video by 3DEx. Both the rock and log models were sculpted by dynameshing, sculpting with the damstandard and trim dynamic brushes, however the process differed between the two when the rock required the use of the clipcurve tool to achieve it's jagged edges and deep cracks, and the bark effect on the side of the log required using the deco1 brush.
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Retopology and UV mapping on all of these models was done with speed in mind; since I was making a large range of models, I needed to work quickly to meet my deadline, so I decimated the lowpoly of each mesh down to a low, manageable number of polys (around 4,000 or below) to make decent UVs easier to achieve. After bringing them into Maya to cut seams into them and making sure nothing went wrong with their bake in Substance Painter, they were ready for texturing relatively quickly.
Shaders
For the final scene's shaders I ended up following three tutorials to make my water, leaf, and grass shaders. While these were each for different elements of the environment, the process for each was similar enough to be summed up as this: You plug a color value into the base color node and use normal information to make the mesh appear to move. The end result was an effect that made each environmental element appear to be moving in the wind!