Lighting & Final Touches
Lighting was originally utilizing Unreal’s default daytime, once the scene was more established, I switched to using the Ultra Dynamic Sky plug-in. This helped me attain the cloud look I was aiming for. To highlight certain areas used a technique from Karim Yasser that he used on The Traveler UE5 environment. In which he added some lights to adjust the global lighting. I used this technique on the foreground house to highlight the road and lead the eye down the road.
The road is one aspect that went through a lot of iteration, and it was the final thing I touched in the scene. Initially, it was done by sculpting the road on the terrain, but this did not achieve the look I had hoped. After receiving some feedback, instead I took the route of creating the as a spline in Unreal, creating a simple mesh inside of Maya, and using that as a base. The mesh itself was vert painted to help it blend with the terrain and add to its believability. Lastly, I wanted to add some movement into the scene, adding the crow on the roof and the birds in the far background added some much-needed depth that the environment needed.
