Tropical Shores in Unreal 5

Always going back to the ocean for my environment work :)

Like the tropical rainforest post earlier, I have limited time being in one of these beautiful places. But the impression it made on me was truly mesmerizing. Getting the 3 factors of water all working correctly the color, the depth and refraction and the reflection/specularity always proves to be a very tough and rewarding challenge and there’s always room to improve. 🙂 The sparkles here are a niagara effect parallel to the sun to have a bit more control over the ocean sparkles.

This post was an opportunity to try some new techniques that I really enjoyed exploring, some of which were:

Trying a more intricate wind movement technique on the plam trees by using the wiggle bone plugin in Blender with an animated wind force for the palm trees as skeletal meshes. Might bake these down into vertex displace maps later on.

My machine is getting pretty old these days and for making the clouds I wanted to get around spending tons of time rendering cycles with blender clouds. So instead I created some sculptures with nanomesh spheres to create cloud forms in Zbrush. Then taking the Zbrush render passes like shadow, SSS, and AO to compile the final materials in Unreal.

Also loved making a crab model again :P