Lighting and Skydome Progress

     Lately, I've worked more on the tea mesh, the lighting, and the sky dome. My goal is to make it feel like a cloudy early morning. I think it's getting a bit closer, but I still want to layer in more clouds in the sky dome. In addition, I'm planning to add some flow maps and panning noise textures for animation.

    Next, I'm going to work on the cloud cards that are placed in the level. I think they're too translucent right now, and I want to give them more of a sense of volume. Another thing that I want to do is make the ground less flat looking. If I make a ground cover mesh and perhaps add tessellation and more roughness variations to the terrain materials, that should help give it more depth. Overall, I think those will be some good goals to work on next. Afterwards, I can continue refining the tea mesh and sky dome.

Progress on Landscape Materials

        Over the last couple of weeks, I worked on landscape materials. I thought this project would be a great opportunity to get more practice with Substance Designer. Following the "Forest Ground" tutorial by Get Learnt w/ Chunk, I made a ground generator to create three main material variants.

        I also followed a tutorial by Bohdan Bilous to create a terrain generator. Right now, I'm only using the color as a macro texture for the landscape material. I'm planning to use it for the background mountains later on too. Basically, I just blended between the close texture and the macro texture based on the distance between the material world position and the camera.

        Next, I will add more variations to the ground materials and work on a custom cloud mask for the sky. Additionally, I'm going to revisit the tea plants too. I think they could use a bit more dimension and negative space to them, so I'm going to see if I can add more cards and rely less heavily on the filler mesh that I'm using in the center of the plant.

Block Out Part 2

        Here's an update on the block out. I added some clouds, edited the lighting a bit, and painted some basic colors on the landscape.

        Next, I'm going to block out a few more areas along the main road and start on some of the landscape materials.
 

Tea Garden Block Out

        I'm taking a break from the Bigfoot project to work on something with a smaller scope. My plan is to make an environment inspired by the tea gardens in Darjeeling.

        So far I've made some hills and placed some tea plants throughout the scene. I also made a blueprint to scatter the plants along a spline.

        In terms of assets, I want to limit the scene to the tea plants, ground materials, and some background trees and mountains. Next I'll block out the background elements to fill in the rest of the scene.