The Secret Forest - 1 Day build

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I wanted to challenge myself to see what I could make in a day. I recently introduced my daughter to Princess Mononoke and realised instantly I wanted to make a forest scene. But one of colour and texture.

The scene below is build in Unreal 4 with only one dynamic light source. The light rays and RGB rays are all faked, and the scene uses a mixture of pre-made and bought assets. The particle effects around the stone shine on the island and around the tree edges were taken from a laser weapon charging effect before firing. 

An issue that 'pops up' now again is that the procedural foliage is floating after environment sculpting. This can be easily solved using the command prompt and entering either "removelandscapexyoffsets" or "grass.flushcache".


I'm a big believer in using natural light in a scene, and creating immersive world that not only look great but feel exciting to look around. Lighting is a big part of that. Forest lighting is amazing but I wanted to create something different as the end result isn't your typical render. I decided to 'paint' the scene with coloured 'static' lights. This was to help the scene feel almost magically and create a secret place.

This is the scene using lighting only.



To get the best render possible I made some changes to the level blueprint.


Increasing the indirect Lighting quality from 4 to 10 uses a lot of resources, and takes a long time to build the lighting but it's worth it.


Importing a 4K Hi-resolution screenshot into Photoshop, I added a gradient overlay and made a quick vignette. Using auto colour balance and a small change to the blue channel in curves produced the required effect.


Then I applied a Dry brush filter. 


Followed by a stylized Oil Paint filter. Playing around with these settings probably took the most amount of time.


And voila! A great 'Secret Forest' oil painting.


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