Hey everyone! Back with an update. I’ve been able to get back into a bit of a groove working on this.
I spent some modeling out props for the environment and tweaking the lighting here and there. I was able to get snow set up in Substance Designer and Unreal. There is a great tutorial by Jacob Norris - Forest Snow Ground Tutorial https://purepolygons.gumroad.com/l/Tut-FGS-all?recommended_by=library. It has been super helpful especially in furthering my knowledge on how blueprints work in Unreal and setting up shaders. I’m going to continue tweaking the snow and improving that to how I want over the course of the environment because it is going to need some work along with the terrain.
I was also able to create a Cherry Blossom Tree for the background behind the shrine. SpeedTree was new to me, but I found it easy to get the hang of everything and there was another very helpful tutorial in Artstation Learning. It’s called Tree Production Using Speedtree with Dekogon and Kat Yang does the Tutorial. It was awesome and I highly recommend it to anyone who needs an introduction to SpeedTree https://www.artstation.com/learning/instructors/dekogon-studios.
It helped seeing where I left off because sometimes I felt I wasn't making enough progress. It helped to put things in perspective comparing my current state to where I left off at. There is still more work to be done, but I am excited to push further.
Since my last blog post I had started my first freelance opportunity in August and I finished up in November. I am extremely thankful to get my first opportunity in the industry and since then I was able to get back into this project and pick things up. I have different milestones set for this environment which helped sooooo much in picking things back up. Progress is Progress. Enjoy your wins no matter how big or small! This next phase of the environment is what I enjoy the most and that is sculpting. I want to try and be a bit more in-depth in the next update.