The first thing Jess and I did was create a pitch deck of our project. With a deadline of 10 weeks we knew we had to have our idea blocked out on boards and a schedule we could both agree with. We also gathered some references as well.
Below are jus a few slides of our pitch deck.
Once our project was approved I went ahead and began to explore procedural modelling for the landscape of our project. I really enjoyed playing with the splines to create unique shapes for the base of the landscapes.
I also tried mixing procedural modelling and sculpting using alphas.
The experiment that really made the most impact was creating heightfield maps with the help of Tangram Heightmapper, adjusting them in Photoshop.
Heightfields 3D Renders 1
Heightfields 3D Renders 2
Heightfield Example 1
Heightfield Example 2
Heightfield Example 3
Within 3 weeks, Jess played with some storyboards and rough camera layout of a rough environment. I was able to create some bases for our environment as possible options. Another classmate of ours, Ben Gilbert, also wanted to contribute a few trees for our project as well.
After another 12 weeks, I gathered Megascans, Unreal Marketplace assets, and custom assets Ben made to put in the environments I had made. It was very interesting playing with foliage in Unreal 4.27. Jess was able to begin lighting as well. Below are some final images of our film.
