Elaine Tanaka - Technical Artist 2024

Garden of Words Inspired Pond Scene

I wanted to create a Garden of Words by Makoto Shinkai inspired scene in Unreal Engine. My goal was to make everything procedurally. I started by creating leaf cards and fish particles in substance designer. The foliage was created with a combination of Maya and SpeedTree.

I used this project to begin study into PCG set piece generation. It was exciting to see how quickly something complex like a pond tool could be created.

This shot was inspired by the movie poster from Garden of Words. I am pretty happy with how far I was able to push the post processing to get an anime like effect on these assets.

The rainy pond features fish particles that will fade in and swim around. The rain will spawn a splash every time it collides with the water.

I had to get the classic anime tree shot to finish out this piece.  The cloud cards were quickly hand painted in Photoshop.

Here is the mesh layer breakdown. The water, floor, and inner decorations were sampled from the inside of the spline. The density of decoration can be increased. The rest were sampled on the spline with transform offsets to get a nice border density.

This is the PCG graph of the pond. The rock border is in another graph because i thought it might be nice to use it to line pathways in the future.

This is the swimming fish particle shader.
Color: Niagara can pick a random uv coordinates and colors within a set range to get unique noise patterns on each fish.

The swimming works by applying a slightly random sine rotation and applying that motion to only the tail with a linear gradient mask

All of the textures in this scene were created procedurally in substance designer.

I had a lot of fun building these two textures. It was a very complex challenge to get a good shape for the veins of the lotus petal. The fish got a lot more love in Unreal to finish the color.

Here is a breakdown of all of the assets used in the generators. The leaf shader has slight wind offset and instance color variation to add some life to the scene.

The tree and all of the bushes were made in Speedtree. UVs were touched up in Maya to use the leaf atlas I made in Designer.

Composition and texture references

Three Blades Ranch

I wanted to showcase some of the blueprints, shaders, and experimentation that I have been doing during the development of Three Blades Ranch.

This is a voxel western management simulation game. Due to being made with such a small team, I wanted to create tools to do as much as I can procedurally while fitting within the cozy art style.

Three Blades Ranch is a cozy fantasy ranching sim so you will see familiar critters along with more magical ones as well. This game is set in the wild west so there is lots of opportunity for clutter. I am heavily inspired by miniatures and model train set decoration when creating environments.

The weather system in the game was important to define early so that we can start to communicate the passage of time to play testers.

Sun and moon directional light rotate and blend intensity based on time of day. If the light intensity is set to 0, the light will be set be disabled for performance. Every morning the weather is set based on a random weather curve.

Season Value is updated in BP_Weather_Ctrl and stored in a material parameter collection. Clutter Mesh blueprints can reference the MPC to spawn a season appropriate mesh.

Pixelated single layer water shader. At night, the water will become more emissive so that it is visible and fits within the stylized art style.

You can see the trample in action in this test scene. I decided to only track other animals if they are currently being lassoed by the player. This way I can reduce the chain of MPC Position masks

The trample shader works by referencing the player position through a material parameter collection. The vertices within a spherical mask around the player slightly rotate and move down to create a trample effect.

Originally all of the buildings were created with voxel, then voxel kits. Eventually I went with a low poly voxelesque kit and pixelated texture atlas. I referenced Alba's workflow for ideas to lower poly count.

The building went from 31k tris and 15k verts to 10k tris and 7k verts. And that is with the added flower pot decorations. Overall it is a lot faster and easier to iterate. I think the illusion is still there as long as its surrounded by voxel props