Its alien day this month (LV426) and I'm cranking those alien films out whenever I can, here's a giger inspired doodle I'm thinking of making into a material. 

I've been dabbing at this environment for a couple months whenever I have a little time. Its a trail leading up to a temple some time in the feudal japan era, possibly walking past some graves, to a final fight? Still ironing out the who, what, & when as I make the basic assets like grass, trees, etc.

I settled on a golden hour type lighting  post storm, after trying out some overcast, mid day etc. I'm not the best lighter but I thought it would give me more interesting lighting to play with, & switch up things from other pieces I've worked on color wise. 

-One of my goals for this project is to be more conscious of color palettes and composition.  My thinking is that the first part of the path should feel welcoming, and as you get closer to the temple (more graves, more signs of a battle that happened), the trees get more red indicating blood shed.

All critiques welcome, thanks!

Current status:  

Blockout from a few weeks back: 

Took advantage of today's overcast to finally try out some photogrammetry. 133 images built at medium quality, I think this is something that may become addicting!

Little experiment during lunch with the new dual height fog that comes with 4.23, pretty neat!

Referene: 

I haven't explored how powerful the emissive lighting feature is in unreal yet, here's a first dab at it. This is just a plane with a basic parallaxed material, and a dome with an image of a tokyo street plugging into the emissive slot. Really simple to get something moody! As far as I know, this only works with baked static lighting, give it a try!

Post siggraph I was inspired by all the real time projects VFX houses are doing in Unreal 4, especially the MPC peeps who demoed the Lion King and the Quixel team on rebirth. This was a title exercise with quixel assets to become a little more familiar with UE4's cinematic camera & console commands, as well as some natural lighting and clumping. 

In between environment projects, I like decompressing by going back to look at photos & do some editing, here's a few while I was in LA during siggraph! 

A little panther sketch in zbrush to get out of my comfort zone, and mess with some BPR rendering & photoshop :)