Mood Board:
I started off with a mood board to define what idea I had in my head. I was thinking about realistic nature waterfalls with a cave at the base of it. I used these as reference throughout the process.
Water Shader:
The First thing I needed to tackle was the water shader. I Pulled assets from free epic scenes on market place to see what I could use and modify and throw away the rest. This asset was only usable in 4.x versions of Unreal, so I had to update the nodes to work in version 5.1 and did some early testing.
Added Mist Using Niagara System and sourced some learning materials to bounce off ideas from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_soSQb11fc&ab_channel=CodeLikeMe
Created material Instance and the tweaked parameters to liking
Modified Shader to add colour tint Parameter to foam.
Downloading and choosing high quality assets from Quixel Bridge.
Testing and assorted assets to see what feel and style I wanted to go for
Scene layout:
Path and landscape block out:
I blocked out some basic shapes in Unreal for the path and landscapes. I then exported to Blender, to then refine and mould into something that looks nice.
Creating vegetation:
Imported new path and landscapes into Unreal. Using an epic tree library, I bundled the low and mid range foliage in the painting tool to distribute effectively over the larger areas and to hide transition points from path to the ground floor.
Create other assets:
I wanted a hero asset to really make the scene pop and have a subsidiary focal point rather than the waterfall alone. I chose to create a bridge, once again with Quixel assets. It helped solidify the scene and give it some purpose.
lighting:
Camera effects:
I did some light colour grading and added effects, like aberration, lens flare, vignette and film grain. I also custom animated camera shake as Blueprint into the tracking of the camera to create a feeling of being there, walking out from under the waterfall cave.
Optimizing:
To optimize this scene I took every texture map and resized them in order of importance. Most normal maps were reduced to 512, while albedo and roughness sat around 2k, with assets that were closer to the camera I would use 4k textures.
Rendering:
I decided to use the differed renderer, in the movie render queue sequencer, to output the final animation. It took 20hrs for 1000 (1-2min/image) in 4k with a Temporal Sample Count of 64.I then did 2 other shots to show the scene from different views and lighting situations which were shot in HD.
Final thoughts:
I worked on this project over 5 days, within my spare time. I had some hiccups with the water not rendering correctly with the Pathtracer as it did not seem to like translucency vary much, that is why I stuck with the deferred renderer. The particle system did not initially render out as I had forgotten that when the render button is pressed, it is essentially the same as executing simulation, and therefore needed time for the particles to disperse. To solve this I gave the renderer some warm up frames!
Turn On sound! :D