For the GDD to represent my game Idea apart from the set trailer, I want to produce a series of renders that will show the vibe and feel of the game acting as Representations of the game world in my GDD. As the game is going to be set in the forest I wanted a piece to show how ambient and unsettling this environment would be in gameplay. Below is some images of new forest under dense mist wish is how I want the render to come out as in game play I would want a constant heavy mist in the game world obscuring the player's vision. Also key things to note is the vegetation and type of trees as they are essential to getting right if I want to capture the same vibe as the forest.
Real World Reference
One of the main reasons I picked this environment and place is due to my fascination with the forest and the true feeling of being alone there which can come across as peaceful but could easily be turned into an unsettling experience. In my last visit the forest was hit by a heavy fog, which captured the vibe I wanted for my game. Below is a slideshow of images I captured on that trip and will be used for future reference.
Composition and Image Structure
I then wanted to get sort of an idea of how the shot would be structured so began to research unsettling images from forest and started to make a mental note of key factors I liked in the overall presentation. The 2 big take aways I had when looking into this was to have strong defined silhouette of the characters or creatures and to have a big enfaces on cold lighting. Leading into making the 3D scene the main things I wanted it to capture was a night time scene, heavy fog, silhouettes and cold lighting.
Making the Scene
I began by blocking the scene out using a tree model I created quickly but as I got into the lighting further on I kept as the lighting was low enough for the quality of them not to be noticeable. I know used one of my older models as a placeholder for the enemy as it fits the shape of what I want that character to be in a basic sense.
Foliage
I then began to move onto the more demanding sections of the scene such as the vegetation, I began with first working on the ground. The grass is split up into two duplicated model one representing a small tuft of grass and the other representing a more fern like ground plant. The colour for each plant where set to different shades of slightly translucent green using blender's node system to texture. These models then use separate array system to be disturbed onto the plane that represents the mud. Using separate array systems allowed me to control the amount and density of the different types as there would be more of the standard tufts of grass unlike the fern type. This was done through the weight paint workspace where I highlighted the areas where the grass would be.
The final area of the floor that need to be done was the actual texture of the model. As this scene needed to be done in a short amount of time I had to do the texturing in blender through nodes even though I would of ideally wanted to do this through substance, to create a look closer to actual wet mud. This step was pretty simple as I had create an similar texture in first year for the street scene blender project. So using the same technique with some extra details to improve areas of the texture such as parts emulating puddles, I think it achieved close enough of a texture using Blender's node system.
Moving on to the leaves of the trees, I did another array system on displace cubes. This is a really rough way to do this but I knew when lighting was put onto the scene my goal was to have only the silhouette of the tree's foliage to be shown. If there needed to be more detail when I began to do test renders I could easily come back to this area and add more detail.
Node Setup
Below are the two different node setups for the grass texture and the Mud texture. The grass texture being the simple one of the two, with it mostly running through transparent BSDF node. the other nodes that run through control the power of that node and the colour of the blades of grass. The node setup for the mud is more complex as it needed the texture convey multiple areas of the mud such as height, roughness and colour. The base of the node set up is through a Noise Texture this is what creates the overall pattern the mud will be based on. Using this set in place node it allows me to control different sides of the patterns roughness emulating water and wet mud. With the addition of a colour ramp using that same Noise texture's Coordinates giving me control of the colour of the mud and the water. This information is all finally ran through the displacement channel so the textures gives off the impression of height.
With all models done and textures added, this is how the scene was beginning to look....
Volume Metric Fog
The fog that was in the scene is comprised of two different settings. First of all we have the overall fog of the scene which is purely made by using the volume tab under world settings and applying a Volume scatter modifier to it and set it to a low number to apply a light covering fog that scatters light that goes through the world. The second addition and easily the most noticeable in the scene is a dense fog close to the ground in the trees. This was accomplished by creating a wide short cube into the scene along the floor and added a material using a Volume BSDF node and with the addition of several other nodes that allow me to control the thickness and the fade off.
Building Up Lighting
With the first pass on the lighting I wanted to establish the main base of the scene. With one light representing the moon coming from the top right of the render and from the bottom left a warm light with it resembling something of a car's headlights. The moon light is set up with a large point light with a heavy power set to a very light blue. The car headlights I set up by having two spot lights space apart facing the same direction set to a higher power compared to the moon using a muted orange colour.
I then moved onto the lighting of the creature's eyes which had been something that I was exploring in the concept for this character. With them having a light electric blue eyes that radiate light from their eye sockets. To achieve this look in the render I added a pair of high powered small blue point lights for each character and that finished this part.
I then wanted to bring up the lighting of the forest and around the creatures just to outline silhouettes present in the render but not have any object to over lit. This was done by a variety of low level point and spot lights set at precise places. This was the stage that required the most attention as it took a while for me to feel satisfied with the overall lighting.
Final Render
Below you can see the final render which will present in future documents about the game and the final GDD. Im happy with the overall result and I feel it presents the horror aspects of the game. This whole process was overall quite quick and was completed in one day so moving forward once I have more models related to the game idea I will produce more of these concept piece presenting other elements of the game.
