Environment painting analysis

For the final project, I decided to rebuild the environment created by Slawek Fedorczuk, in unreal engine 4.27.

Slawek Fedorczuk is a very creative artist especailly in color design. His painting is always breathtaking. The scene looks neither cartoonish nor completely realistic. The base color or local color design is more dreamy with delicate color variation around it. It emphasised the play of ‘natural’ light which gives a feeling of impressionist paintings. Although rich colors are used here, the scene still look very clean.

The sunlight direction can be found through the shadow.

The color of the water seems to be blue and it turns to be green when meeting with yellow light.

Some part of the dock turn to be purple and some just covered by blue water on our side.

Texture

For this scene, all the assets look irregular with abstract strokes as texture. Hence I adopt the method from https://80.lv/articles/stylized-nature-vegetation-animation-shaders/

I use white textures with alpha channel for the static assets, compressed at a 256×256 size. All the colors are controlled through ue material system, which makes it easier to match color to achieve a desired result in the real-time scene.

Dock

I model multiple lowpoly planks and stakes, them merge them together in maya as it is easier to precisely position the asset to match the correct position as the illustration shows using maya. I set the normals as conform because they all have sharp edges in stylization.

I use five materials for the whole dock, unwrap the UV properly and create black and white mappings in photoshop to mimic the strokes. I also generate normal maps to give some uneven texture.

Mountains

I use the same technique as what some artists create stylized trees. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/9QGVy

I start with modelling the mountain shapes which match to the reference in general.

Firstly I create the three planes which are perpendicular to each other and then set the UV. After that I combine the these planes and transfer the vertex normals from the mountain shape to the combined planes to correct the normals.

Character and animation

Butterfly

I create butterfly from a simple two-polygon mesh, I skin the wings with the skeletons and make the animation for import into UE4.

By observing the trajectory of the butterfly’s wings, I set that the rotation range of the wing bones is from -20° to 70° within Z axis.