Author: Chuhan Dai

While creating the forest, I kept trying different ways to place and adjust materials to make the environment feel vivid and full of life. I grouped plants and flowers using “Ctrl+G‘ and then copied and pasted them，this really helped efficiency up and improve the overall look.

To be honest, working on the same scene for a long time started to feel quite draining and stressful. Sticking too long in one place didn’t actually make the visual result better, so once I roughly finished the fancy forest, I shifted my focus to the stress forest at the beginning of the story.

After completing the afterpart overview, I started building the initial “forest of fear.” This section uses a first person perspective, so visually, I need to create a narrow and dark atmosphere through a crowded environment. To do this, I created a dense forest with closely spaced trees.

Looking at the second image, it still felt far from enough, so I made changes in the Landscape Mode, raising the land higher on both sides, leaving a slightly sunken path in the middle.

I tried using the foliage painting tool to build the tense forest for the earlier part of the story. I thought that to convey tension, the environment shouldn’t feel too open but rather cramped and dim. However, every time I painted using Foliage Mode, the result looked messy and disorganized, whether I used Single mode or tried Erasing after painting, I couldn’t get the tool to work well. The vegetation didn’t “grow” in a visually pleasing or orderly way, and I’m not entirely sure why. So, in many areas, to keep things organized and control the composition better, I ended up manually placing each plant one by one which is the old stupid way.

At the same week I try to learning some lighting set to prepare the next week or after building landscape part, so I watch lots of video on Youtobe, I will attached two of my favorite tutorial.

Here is the Tutorial to create the nervous vibs.

In this week, we leanning the dynamic lighting about how to add the light and built the house to show the light types and change the light color. and I learn a pretty cute name “Lumen”, whichis in Unreal Engine 5 is a fully dynamic global illumination and reflection system designed for next generation consoles. But for me at this moment it is quite hard to use well.

About the homework，I started building the forest scene using Landscape Mode. On the first day, I had no clear idea how to begin, so I referred back to the world map I had drawn earlier and slowly adjusted the material colors and scales.

When I looked at it from a faraway distance, it felt too simple, so I decided to add a stone path. But after searching for a while, I couldn’t find a suitable stone path material. Then, in Fab, I found an ancient Roman style path, but its material was too bright; it almost glowed in the dark(see the picture), and overall it looked too urban and didn’t fit the forest setting.

So I wondered if I could paint my own path instead. I created a Plane and found a pretty good material for it, though I wasn’t sure if the tiling would work well. While learning the tutorials, I came across a nice pond asset and thought: maybe I could combine the path with a small pool, that might look better. So I started setting up a little pond scene.

Then I followed a tutorial to create the water material for the pond, but the material I made turned out green. After looking carefully, I realized the sample color for red wasn’t set correctly, different red reflection actually produce different blues or even greens. I also had to adjust the transparent . Finally, I got the pond and stone path looking the way I wanted.

Reference and New material

This week I began working on my main project. Even though many knowledge point were covered in class, I couldn’t remember everything clearly when I actually started. So I had to learn some skills on my own again. I also ran into several difficulties when I use in my project.

For example, I wanted my terrain to have some hills and slopes, not just be completely flat. So I looked for tutorial videos online (https://youtu.be/ZDD-JMcfEII?si=M4WXiAipYc_fzy2N) about creating terrain. At first, I didn’t understand how to set up a texture blueprint, but luckily there were free tutorial videos that showed internet that I could adjust the roughness, Metallic, ect.

However, the scale of my landscape material was too large at first, the UVs parameter too small and looked very strange. I then found a tutorial video in Blibili that explained how to change the UV settings in the material node. (I found the Landscape Coordinates and adjusted the Mapping Scale. After trying different values, I chose 5, which shows me the effect I wanted.) Then I started placing and editing materials. (Some attached screenshots are in Chinese version，because I temporarily switched to the Chinese version while working. I’ll change it back to English later so everyone can easily to understand.)

After that, I began sculpting the terrain without a clear plan. To be honest, the world of my story isn’t fully clear in my mind yet, but I knew I didn’t want just flat woods—I wanted land with some height changes. So I looked at many references, including works by a concept artist I really like from Bulgaria, Ismail Inceoglu.

Reference of Forest