Meowchemy - Forest Environment

This work is part of my final university game project and my favourite thing I've ever made: Meowchemy. This is a fantasy potion making simulator with a witchy feline protagonist, and this forest is where they go out to forage for ingredients for their potions. The magical colour scheme for the scene was inspired by Izzy Burton’s illustrated cover for The Lovely Dark (2023) by Matthew Fox, and a big inspiration for the house design was Katerina Kaymachnikova's concept art and its 3D interpretation by Aleksei Telenchenko (https://caravangoes.artstation.com/projects/beRyg).
I used Maya for 3D modelling, Substance 3D Painter for creating hand-painted textures, Krita for tileable textures (such as the grass and dirt), and Unreal Engine 5 for assembling the scene.
I used a Runtime Virtual Texture as part of my landscape workflow, which allowed the grass to pick up the colour from the texture underneath it, as inspired by Nina Klos' tutorial (https://www.artstation.com/blogs/ninaklos/NVBB/stylised-grass-in-unreal-engine-4). This allowed for easier colour variation, avoiding making separate mesh assets for each type of grass. I created the 3D grass as planes curving outwards, using an opacity mask to define their shape, and painted it onto the landscape as a foliage asset. Additionally, I created separate textures for the grass to swap between based on the distance from the player camera; grass blades are more defined in the texture used for close-ups (A-C), while a more abstract and simplified one is used for longer distances (D-F). This avoids the issue of tiled textures looking too repetitive. To optimise the scene for real-time gameplay, I also set up the grass to stop rendering at a certain distance from the player.

Sound Effects
Forest ambience: https://freesound.org/people/klankbeeld/sounds/485790/