JUELICKS
Project Details
Birch Meadow
A landscape project intended to capture the nostalgia and visual distortion of dreams. Includes a meadow, pond, hill and forest.
Design Choices
For the environment, I made assets of foliage you might find in a real birch forest. This included ferns, wild ginger, birch trees and bushes.
I made additional assets to be used in the center meadow, sunflowers and occasional boulders, to help fill out the empty space. I also made orange variants of the birch trees and bushes, to communicate that the seasons are changing.
To make the scene feel nostalgic, I used post-processing with chromatic aberration and lens-flare, along with a very slight fish eye effect on the camera.
A dream should look almost real where you're focusing, but noticeably off on the edges of your vision. I think it achieves this effect well.
Level Design
The layout itself is fairly straight forward. Since this level is more for visual purposes, the focus was on making great views.
A hill was placed in the northwest corner of the map, both to add elevation to the terrain as well as allow for an overview of the scenery.
A pond was placed in the center, large enough to be viewed easily from a high vantage point.
To fill in the rest of the maps empty space, a birch forest was created around the edges with dense foliage.
Asset Creation
All assets in this project, besides the skybox, were created by me.
The project was modeled in Maya, with textures created in Photoshop.
I took Adobe Stock images I liked, then used Photoshop to make them seamless.
For the terrain textures, a second noise map was created and layered over the initial seamless grass texture to make the texture pattern random.
The project was assembled in Unreal Engine 5.
Project Gallery
All renders from this project
