I've been working heavily on the Walking Dead season 4 lately, so to escape the doom and gloom of a post-apocalyptic world I wanted to create something serene and pleasant. So I've decided to rework an old scene from 2013, completely replacing all assets in the process. The idea for the environment is an Item Shop located on a deserted Island. I'm definitely not going to pretend that this scene isn't inspired by Wind Waker, Rime, Chrono Cross etc.

This is the current state of it. So far I've mainly been doing foliage, lighting, terrain and Water tests in order to get the style feeling right. The composition is also much of a WIP, as Im still exploring the possibilities. I'm using UE4 of course ;)

(The Hut and the Palm trees are still old assets)

Water:

The Water shader is actually the same one used in the game "Rime". as Tequila Works was kind of enough to release it to the Public. It took some tweaking in the material instance to get it to look right for me scene, but its overall very user friendly. You can find it here:

https://80.lv/articles/rime-breaking-down-the-stylized-water/

("Rime" by Tequila Works)

Water ripples:

The water ripples are also inspired by "RIme", you can find a tutorial on how to create them on Simon Trümpler's VFX blog:

https://simonschreibt.de/gat/stylized-vfx-in-rime/

Foliage:

I wanted very stylized grass that almost reads as one single mass, where you can barely see the transition from ground to grass. Luckily I came across  Jess Hider's amazing "stylized wind blown grass" tutorial which you can find on her website here:

https://jesshiderue4.wordpress.com/materials/stylized-wind-blown-grass/

(scene by Jess Hider)

Terrain:

The terrain uses a pretty straightforward vertex blending material. It uses heightmap based tesselation for real time displacement mapping, as well as heightmap-Lerps for a better transition between the grass and Sand:

While the grass is merely a flat color in order to better match the grass cards, the sand was created in substance designer:

full post: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Ad9NW

I used the curve node to create the large dune shapes, the cube3d node for the pebbles. The sand sparkles are based on Daniel Thiger's incredible desert bedrock tutorial which you can find here:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rm93O

Lighting:

I've decided to go with fully dynamic lighting using mesh distance field (the fortnite method)  Even you though you can't use lightmass with this method, I do find it much better suited for stylized environments. Instead of using pre-calculated bounce lighting, you have to place bounce light yourself, which gives you a lot more control over your scene as you basically "paint" the scene with lights

Here's a little tutorial on how to set up mesh distance field lighting:

Next steps:

-sculpting out the modular parts for the hut and foliage

-create some some sun-shade cloth drapes in Marvelous Designer

-many filler assets: rocks, plants, planks, sea shells, bottles, pots, barrels, crates

-figure out a story to give the environment some personality

Thank you for having a look! I would be more than happy to hear feedback and suggestions :)

Cheers.