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Yokoi Pond
Breakdown
2D Rough
Sketch
1
Quick mockup of the scene. I only need to establish the focal points during this phase, so I'm keeping things fast and messy!
2
3D Blockout
The base environment is
modeled in Blender.
Special props, such as
lily pads, grass, and
trees are handled in
engine and other software.
3
Terrain
The grass and flowers are initialized on terrain using GPU instancing.
To achieve this t3ssel8r style grass, the grass mesh's color matches the point on the terrain it is on, combined with a Perlin noise function to achieve a cloud scrolling effect.
!
To match the color of the terrain, its normal data is passed to the lighting calculations of the grass.
4
Materials and Shaders
Stylized materials were created in Substance Designer, with the exception of the water shader. In engine, all materials use toon lighting.
Wood material was inspired by Julio Sillet's procedural wooden planks.
5
Foliage
Trees were procedurally generated with Houdini. Using the Quick Basic Tree node, I added parameters such as flower scattering, grouped normals, and wind physics.
Lighting looks much cleaner when each leaf plane approximates its normals!
6
Entities and Animation
What's a Koi pond without Koi fish? To add some flair through movement,
I modeled and animated Koi fish via dampened inverse kinematics.
As for movement, I implemented a simple raycast to avoid intersection, along with custom parabolic motion for jumping & launching.
The fishing line uses Verlet integration to add some slack, visualized by Unity's line renderer.
This part is
my favorite!
7
Props, VFX, and Post-Processing
For final touches, I added polish elements such as falling petals, beams from the pond, lanterns, lilypads, and more. It was challenging to maintain the focal point while adding more details!
Conclusion
Yokoi pond was a fun little side project to create a stylized environment in a Japanese setting. This was a great opportunity to pour all of my skillsets in a little scene and is a great holistic overview of what kind of work I specialize in!
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