Harvest Witch's Cottage

Hello! I'm so excited to submit my latest project to The Rookies. This project was a huge technical challenge for me, but I learned so much about technical art and Unreal Engine 5 and had so much fun in the process. 

This project is based off of "Harvest Witch's Cottage" by Jessica Woulfe. 

My first step for this project was to gather reference. I spent a lot of time looking through other projects and games I admired to figure out what general direction I wanted to take the art style. Additionally, I spent a lot of time exploring google maps street view to get various references to work from. My basic goals for this project are as follows: 

- Push my material creation in Substance Designer 

- Create stylized foliage and learn SpeedTree 

- Dive in to more technical art

My first steps were to generally block out the scene, and to set up my master materials, foliage, landscape, and water shaders. I knew that if I had those set up early, it would be a lot easier to iterate on the scene. 

For the landscape, I knew I wanted to use a few different techniques. Firstly, I set up RVT blending for the grass so that I could create a more painterly effect. I also knew that I didn't want the landscape to be a solid color underneath the grass, so I created a grayscale grass image in Substance Designer which I multiplied with various colors within the landscape material.  I then blended the grass and pathway materials with a height blend to create a better transition between the two.

Next, I used a combination of triplanar blending and auto materials to transition the grass in to the water. The material is set up so that I can control the contrast between the grass and the cliff, as well as the blending height. I knew that the cliff material didn't need to be very detailed because it was just meant to help transition the grass in to the water, and it would likely be covered by rocks. 

I then spent a decent chunk of time working on the water shader and the waterfall. I haven't spent too much time in Niagara, so I knew this was going to be a major challenge for me. Luckily I found some amazing resources by a few artists that helped me create the effect I was looking for. 

The water shader is based off this tutorial by Rimaye.

I followed Dylan Meville's twitter breakdown of his waterfall to create the flowing effect.

Next, I used Niagara to layer three additional effects. Firstly, I created a water ripple. Then, I layered two different splash effects. While by themselves I was concerned it would look a little cartoonish compared to the rest of the scene, I thought it looked very close to what I was trying to achieve when all layered together.

My next challenge was to tackle the rocks. I used RVT blending once again to blend the rocks in to the landscape for a more natural effect. Secondly, I created a "MossOnTop" material function so that the moss material would always be facing up no matter how the rock was rotated. This helped greatly with the versatility of the rocks, as I only had to sculpt a few different rock assets which I was able to use in many different ways.  

Once I had most of the technical art set up, I spent a long time iterating on my materials. Much of my time spent on this project was within Substance Designer, and I held off on most of the major assets until I was mostly happy with my materials. 

One major feature I wanted to add was a moss effect that was both height blended and blended with a noise map. For this, I followed this tutorial. 

I created a material function that would add noise to the height map so I could control the edge noise contrast and tiling for different effects. This was super useful in my entire scene- I used this material function in my master material and was easily able to blend moss into any material I wanted without a lot of extra setup. 

Working on the sculpted assets was fairly straightforward. I only had a few in the scene, and I'm already comfortable with the process. I love sculpting and found this part of the process really relaxing. 

Lastly, I created the rest of the foliage for the scene. All my foliage was created in Substance Designer, with a few final touches in Photoshop on the base color map. Once I was happy with the placement in Substance Designer, I arranged the foliage in different formations in Maya and then exported that in to Unreal Engine. 

My trees were fairly straightforward as well. I used SpeedTree to create a base mesh, and used Victoria Zavhorodnia's Stylized Tree tutorial to create the material for the leaves. The bark was created in Substance Designer.  

For my final touches, I create a few very subtle decals and added a leaf blowing effect. Because my materials were already so painterly, I didn't want to add too many decals which would make the scene feel too busy. 

For the falling leaves, I used a simple material that combined an alpha map with an emissive color in Niagara. 

Thank you so much for taking a look at my project! I really enjoyed working on this, and I learned so much in the process. I am so much more comfortable tackling technical art, and I feel more excited to create than ever.