[WIP] Tropical Rain Forest

DanielPeres

Hey guys, I am back again to creating new art since I finished my last project. This time I want to focus in a complete environment, and I want to focus mainly on something that I feel to be my weakest skill, Foliage. 

With that in mind I decided to dedicate my free time to this project and get my hands on something that has always been in my mind as a future project, a Tropical Rain Forest in detail, the Tropical forests of South America. I started to gather some references and read about the rain forest, and I got really engaged on this project after I have done so, and this is because I learned that this type of forests have really complex biomes (actually kind of 4 biomes into one), with a lot of different species that depend and/or affect each other in crazy ways.

The goal is to give this environment that feel of a really full and unexplored jungle, full of vegetation everywhere you look!

I have been on it for a few days and most of the time has been gathering reference, not only for a moodboard but also for each plant or tree that I will be creating. Here are some screens of my main moodboard and also a quality moodboard (I am using mainly Ghost Recon Wildlands as a quality benchmark) on PureRef:



I have also been doing some kind of blockout for the vegetation, to try and get correct proportions, some mood, and also to study how I will be doing the final textures and to do this I just create some very quick textures inside of photoshop with only albedo and opacity, this way when I start working on the final texture I will be minimizing fails that might take me back a few steps and redo it all over. Also I am mainly focused on getting a good feel without any color or something, basically silhouette as I said! Here is a quick render inside UE4 using Detail Lighting mode:


I know this is still a very early stage, but as always, any C&C, Tips and Tricks or techniques regarding foliage/vegetation creation is very welcome!

Ashervisalis

Looking forward to this. Are you going to be spending time sculpting the land, or are you going for a more flat forest?

DanielPeres

Ashervisalis said:

Looking forward to this. Are you going to be spending time sculpting the land, or are you going for a more flat forest?

I am thinking about focusing more on the vegetation and textures. The terrain will be scupted inside of Unreal to give some small height variation, but what I plan to do is to give good attention to the terrain materials and maybe use some kind of parallax or displacement to give that extra depth and help blending the vegetation with the terrain.

DanielPeres

Really small update!

I have been gathering reference as I said before, but this proved to actually be very time consuming as it is hard to see which plants or trees exist in this areas and it is also hard to find good references for some of them, mainly because this places are quite away from civilization and don't get that many people going there.

For now I have a rough blockout of all the main vegetation assets and this way I can start to get a feeling of the direction it is going, and I have to say that I think that I am getting the feel that I wanted. Later in the project I will probably create some small rocks and vines to help the scene, but for now I am going to start by doing some rough textures for the terrain.

Here is a new screenshot from the same angle:

DanielPeres

I am putting this project on hold for some months because I am moving to a new country for my next gig, will be coming back to this as soon as I have my hands back on my workstation