Stuck in Roots

I decided to spend this weekend on a new project designing a new approach to such an environment with a couple of lighting sets. I used Quixel Megascan assets, and with the help of Unreal's modeling tools, I crafted unique meshes to get some sort of a stylized look...

I used Unreal Engine 5.5.1 with the help of Lumen and Nanite to ensure maintaining higher quality...

For Lighting, I always love to treat Unreal Engine as a canvas and I'm painting light and shadow on it. This approach of advanced lighting technique unlocks the limits and gives the most out of the engine. Being able to control where and how to light each piece of detail is for sure an amazing approach that you should start using, check out the breakdown to see how it goes!

I believe that good lighting requires good sky so I used a custom Mattepainting skybox to get a unique result and better ambient lighting. I also used the Directional Light as a large fill light, to raise the black shadow levels and get more consistent values...

For the fog, I don't use the basic Exponential Height Fog only! I prefer to go with more of a customized workflow that improves the depth and sense of the environment. I used EasyFog by William Faucher to customize it to my taste as well as developing a custom Local Volumetric Animated Fog shader that is used with materials to add more ground fog...

I tried to minimize the number of unique assets, for example, I used one Wooden Blank in this project! I created 2 bent versions of it and assembled the house using only one type of wooden blank, just one...

I used Quixel Trees as well from Black Elder and European Hornbeam to get such high-quality vegetation results. I also created some custom shaders to add moss on top of some Quixel objects, to make the assets look more blended with the environment...

I tried to add another layer of detailed storytelling by bending the roof objects as if this massive tree had fallen on the house, the house is still safe thankfully but it looks like Mother Nature has some sort of power and control over time!

For the windows, I used an advanced glass material that projects specific interior cubemap textures to make them look more realistic as if there are living people in there...

I enjoyed the process of this project so far, starting from a clean slate and seeing the environment being assembled step by step is great!

Practicing a new environment design approach has been something I was missing for a while as I was using ready environments and just Relight them. Of course, Relighting is a lot easier but it lacks the unique design that I can do using available Fab and Megascan assets...

I hope you enjoy and like this project, let me know your thoughts about it :)