Since the last update been adjusting some of the textures and adding some more smaller assets like rocks and walls. Adjusted the lighting and texture saturation to make the shrine pop a little more and the trees a little less. I'm going for an afternoon light to get some more saturated colors specially since the ground is mostly concrete, I reduced the sun intensity a bit and increased the skylight int to get more readability in the shaded areas while still having decent contrast with the direct sunlit elements.

Also some first pass on ground textures for tiles, concrete and gravel. Next I might block out some of the BG street buildings and other stuff and then more smaller props inside the shrine. There is a large temple and other buildings in front of the shrine but for now I'll just focus on this cameras and polish them real good. 

Comments and critique are welcome! 

Updated and polished the PCG procedural scattering, adjusted the material to make the leaves a little more stylized and added some falling leaves VFX to match the wind sway WPO. 

For my next personal project I wanted to do something with a lot of foliage as an excuse to practice and improve, also to do something different from my usual urban hard surface environments. It all started from a picture of Hibiya park in Tokyo that I had as a reference for my last project , I liked it so much that I'm using it as main reference for this one. 

I started by making a list and collecting references of all the main trees and shrub species in the photograph and around the park, modeling individual leaves and branches and baking the hp on top of a plane to make 3 foliage atlases in substance painter. 

Slowly making progress with this scene, for the latest update I mada a sings and symbols texture and started adding some detail and color to the scene. Should have some extra time to work on it as my current freelance project is on hold for a while so hopefully now I can finally finish this scene.

Making some progress on my new environment personal project, missed the Artstation challenge but I really like the concept I did for it so I'll keep working on it and posting progress over here, for now here is the blockout. 

This week I went back to my experiments with PCG procedural environments with the latest version of Unreal 5.3 preview, after a lot of trial and error I managed to get this environment to work (I would recommend still using 5.2 for PCG) It's a lot of fun how easy an quickly you can create environments once you put in the work to properly setup the PCG graph, for this one as an improvement to my older experiments I added landscape sampling so now I can sample the landscape material and spawn meshes according to that, in this case I scattered small rocks everywhere but the foliage is limited to the dry sand and grass landscape textures. Can't wait to see what new things they will add in the next release. 

For this scene I used the assets from my stylized tropical beach asset pack: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/stylized-beach-environment/

Video:   https://vimeo.com/user133212605

More fun tests with procedural environments in UE5.2 now testing PCG with my desert environment (available on the unreal marketplace).