Mushroom house

After some more unfortunate circumstances another group member was unable to do their part and make the fairy houses so I decided to help them out and create them. However, as there is not much time left for me to start modelling several completely different types of houses I thought I would just make one type and create different variations of it. To start the process I looked at many different types of fairy houses, mainly mushroom ones as I would like to have them dotted around the inside of the tree.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From looking at these different types I found that a simple mushroom with a door and some windows would be nice. For extra little details I added a flower bed, chimney and a cover. Below shows my model.

In order to UV map this model I used Udims again for the main mushroom part so I could get different textures for different parts of the same mesh such as the windows, door and chimney.

Next I moved to Substance Painter to texture it. The main mushroom is red with white dots and a bumpy wrinkly texture. I made the windows emissive so they could be used as lighting in my scene and gave them a warm yellow glow. I gave the chimney a stone brick look and made the cove look like it is made from wool. Below shows my textured model which I am very happy with.

After receiving positive feedback from the rest of my group I put the model into my scene. I also was able to add more assets into my scene as other members of my group finished working on theirs. I added vines to the main tree, mud-house on the ground inside the tree and placed glass jars around the scene. There was also some more unfortunate news in that another group member was unable to do their part in making the background trees. However, instead of one of us making them as they would take too long, I just found some trees in the Unreal Marketplace in a pack called  – Landscape Pro 2.0 Auto-Generated Material by STF3d.

Fence and mirror models

These were two last quick models I made to add a bit more detail to the world. For the fence, I tried making it look like it was made from sticks and I made sure it was low poly because I was planning to use the model lots. As for the mirror, I just modelled a 2D plane and shaped it to look like a broken piece of glass, then extruded it slightly.

I then textured the models. For the fence, I just adding a simple wood texture with some blemishes. The mirror was even easier to do as I just made it completely reflective.

 

 

Lighting

This week I also began working on the lighting in my scene. To start with I played with the sky light to try create the time of day I wanted. I found that an early morning golden hour looked perfect for my scene however I felt it needed more fog to help convey that time of day more. At first I tried creating a low laying fog across the ground but this did not work well. Eventually I figured out that creating god rays in my scene would work perfectly so I set out the find tutorials on how to do this. I found this one the most helpful.

After trying this for myself I found it worked great and I got just the effect I wanted. The key was to have the light coming through the trees. Another thing i thought would be very interesting to have in my scene was fireflies. Having moving light sources could give me very interesting lighting effects. I was very unsure of how to go about doing this but thankfully another member of my group was thinking of doing the same thing and showed me this tutorial video they were using.

Below shows how my scene looked with the god rays and the fireflies. I made them, purple as I thought it would make the scene seem more magical.

I was very happy with this look so a showed it to my tutor for some feedback. He was able to show me a better way to get the effect I wanted and told me about adding a post process effect to the scene. This helped a lot and completed affected the look of my scene. Below are some images showing the current look of my seen.

For next week I plan to make two more final models just to add little details to my scene and I have to make a presentation showing my current work.