Fantasy Low Poly Environment
FANTASY LOW POLY ENVIRONMENT
When starting this project, I wanted to learn more about how to efficiently create environment assets like rocks, pillars, grass etc. within a properly planned and structured workflow. Also, I wanted to become more familiar with ZBrush and Photoshop, since I’ve rarely used either. My familiarity with Maya and Unity is pretty good so I needed to find some tutorials in alignment with my needs. Luckily I found one that demonstrates how to do this while working with low poly assets which I will link below.
Udemy Tutorial: Learn To Make Epic Low Poly Scenes In Unity [Beginner]
While the tutorial series was a terrific and informative guide, I took the instructors design and made it my own as much as possible while still applying what was being taught. Take a look at the showcase video below to watch my fully animated diorama with music and sound effects!
SET DRESSING
After modeling the assets within Maya and ZBrush was completed, I brought everything into Unity and began to roughly place the assets in the scene. I wanted to make it seem as though this environment was slowing beginning to crumble and become overtaken by nature. After a general stage was set, I moved onto populating the scene more with assets to further develop it’s story.
OVERPOPULATED
The scene began to take shape, however it started to look like overkill and become very noisy. I wasn’t happy with the direction things were going and thought that cornering the environment by surrounding it with boulders was a poor design choice as well. I began to strip away all the surrounding boulders and grass to calm the scene down more. After that, the diorama began to take its shape.
POLISH & PARTICLES
With everything in place, I then started to add light sources, post processing filters and particle effects. This took the most time due to continually needing to refine the values every time I looked at the scene with a pair of fresh eyes. But after multiple passes adjusting color values, particle emissions, etc. I moved onto animating the camera to navigate and showcase the diorama. Finally, with everything in place I found some royalty free music that best suited the mood the environment was conveying, along with a sound effect over the portal for whenever the camera got close enough for the viewer to hear.