This week I worked on the first scene build. According to the story version, the first scene is the heroine walking into a make-believe world – the Realm of the Too Void.
First, I looked for some reference drawings. My idea was to combine classical Chinese architecture with some cyberpunk elements.
Here are the references I found.
Next, I followed the reference drawings and found some existing assets on the internet that could help me build the scene more quickly. Next, I imported the assets into Maya and built them in Maya, after which I found that some of the assets had no mapping or the mapping felt different from what I wanted the scene to be, so I took the buildings, split the UV and imported them into substance painter to draw the mapping. This part took me a lot of time because some of the models he was merging together and some of them, like the tiled windows, had a large number of faces.
After doing the assets in Maya, I imported the models into UE5 for lighting and rendering, the advantage of UE5 is that I can see the results in real-time and can import millions of faces without getting stuck.
I then made a fluctuating water surface in UE5, using two dynamic water ripple maps and displacing nodes to create the effect of a plane with a water surface.
Finally, I added some special effects lighting to give the scene a cyberpunk feel and added height fog to add some mystery based on the reference.