Week 3: Environment Building

This week I mostly worked on setting up the environment to be specific to the story of the film. The description of the setting is a dark fantasy forest, so I wanted to find a tree model that had a lot of twisted, bare branches. Olivia Wesling found these perfect tree models on Fab that I was able to use for the environment. I also worked on finding different grass, rocks, and stick models that would work with the environment. I plan on researching snow generation on models in Unreal to integrate the models more with the environment by adding snow, since it is difficult to find a variety models that have snow.

I’ve really enjoyed learning / using the PCG workflow, it makes editing aspects of the environment so easy. Plugging in new models is so easy and it all re-generates based on my parameters.

Current Environment Progress

PCG Volume generating varied tree, grass, small and large rocks, and sticks on the ground.

Showcasing PCG in Action

PCG Graph Tree

In the graph tree above you can see how each object category is organized and labeled. The graph pulls height and normal data from the landscape to generate random points, and by using noise, density filters, and also scaling by density the points can be adjusted in different ways.

In the photo above you can see the fairly scattered points being generated for the tree models.

These points, for the general grass, are being fed the tree point distance data and are generated around them to not overlap.

Then those points are filtered down and randomly scaled to generate different grass, rocks, and sticks all over the ground.

To the opposite effect, these points are being generated around the trees to generate some rocks and grass at every tree’s base.

These methods will definitely save me a lot of time when editing the environment. This coming week I plan to fine tune the environment specifically based on the animatic for our green screen test shoot next weekend. Like incorporating where the cocoon will be and the path that she takes in the story to the area where she turns the winter forest to spring. I also want to add more details to the enviornment such as more snow models that are randomly generated and leaves on the ground.