Mountain Cottage

For this Mountain Cottage project I wanted to create an outdoor scene that was more stylized and whimsical. I love a cute little cottage so I knew I wanted to do something with that, but wanted to create more of a story along with it. It started out wanting to make it where a weather witch lived in this cottage, but I suppose it moved more towards a clean energy witch!
This project also gave me a good opportunity to play with the water system within Unreal Engine.

I sketched this up to help me plan out and get the general feel of the scene I wanted.

Asset Breakdown:

This Project compared to my other two was pretty light on the asset creation, but my main focus was the cottage. I decided to build it as one asset instead of modular since I wanted to play with the environment around it more than focusing on building a building. I never attempted a stylized asset before and am definitely planning to explore it more.
While I have experience using Gaia to create mountains, I wanted to try my hand at sculpting a cliff to more closely resemble my sketch.

Making Tree Foliage:

Using Photoshop I created some different leaf alphas, I made a good amount of them since I didn’t know yet how each of them would look. I then used TreeIt (the free version of SpeedTree) so create the shape and trunk of the tree. Then played around with the leaf alphas in Unreal, settling on these two but ultimately going with the one on the left, since it came out as a nice, fluffy tree.

Textures:

I used Substance Painter to texture most of the cottage, but used Designer for the main scene textures. I wanted to created something that looked like brink poking through old flaky plaster for the main body of the house, and bridge. And of course I needed some stylized textures for the landscape. I made the orange rock but found that it was difficult to get it seamless, so I created another material to help break it up.