BETHANY YAO


Hello! I'm Bethany, I design and create interactive experiences with digital medias.
Design
Music
Playground
About
 Email     Twitter     Itch.io
BUNNY ON A JOURNEY



TIMELINEDec 2021 - Jan 2022

PROJECT TYPE
 Personal Project / Environment Art

RESPONSIBILITIES
Design, Modelling, UE4 Implementation

CONTEXT Bunny on a Journey is a UE4 environment art project I created, with the goal of visualizing a fantasy concept I had been dreaming of. To bring this project to life, I learned to create stylized texture that had a hand-painted look using Substance Painter, to sculpt and retopology complex models using Blender, and to write custom shaders in UE4 Material Editor for anime-like foliage that bring about the feeling of Ghibli and Legend of Zelda.

Check out the project


MODELLING Most of the projects I’ve done in the past have been in low-poly artstyles. For this project instead, I aimed to refine my skills in creating more complex models and artstyles, while obtaining a better understanding in the complete process of taking a high-poly model to a game-ready asset.




CREATING THE LANDSCAPELandscape was one of the most important elements of this project. To achieve fluffy anime-like foliage, I adopted unique workflows to prepare the nature assets, such that when combined with a custom shader, they could achieve the stylized look I was aiming for. This workflow focused on adjusting model normals and writing custom shaders, mitigating the light and dark sides of each plane of the foliage, making stylized colorization, and then finally getting the flat fluffy 2D look.



Custom Foliage and Landscape Shader in UE4
Final Look of the Foliage and Landscape


ITERATING ON THE ENVIRONMENT


ADDING A MENU
The final touch I added to this project was the menu. To make it feel even more like a game concept, I wanted it to resemble a start screen. Therefore, I put together a start menu where the assets were made using Photoshop. When the ‘continue’ button was clicked, a camera fly would be triggered to give out the feeling as if it was leading to the game. This was done using UE4’s UMG system, along with some custom BPs.



FINAL OUTCOME


INDEX  NEXT
2023
© BETHANY YAO