Unity, C# - Indie Developer - Artificial Intelligence - Expandable - Dynamic Map Generation
Snowfall is an independent study project that places emphasis on practicing and experimenting with technical art and environmental design. My intention for this project was to explore the process of developing and populating an environment from reference photos, and learn more about writing shaders to achieve different visual effects to create a completed scene. Some of the shader effects I wanted to explore included river flows, snow accumulation, and naturally grown icicles. This page details my progress over the lifespan of the project.
Ground Zero
Above are some screenshots of the very basic terrain for the environment for future stages of the project. The bridge is untextured and primarily acts as a landmark for my reference materials.
River Bends and Motion
At this point, I've started to add some trees to the environment to flesh out the scene. I've also began to include some post processing effects in an attempt to suggest a cold environment. However, the lighting in the scene at this point in time is too dark to properly suggest a temperature, and we've otherwise lost all detail on the river itself. Combined with the design of the trees, the project looks more like a scene from Silent Hill or some other particularly foggy horror game.
Basic Foliage and Atmosphere
At this point, I've started to add some trees to the environment to flesh out the scene. I've also began to include some post processing effects in an attempt to suggest a cold environment. However, the lighting in the scene at this point in time is too dark to properly suggest a temperature, and we've otherwise lost all detail on the river itself. Combined with the design of the trees, the project looks more like a scene from Silent Hill or some other particularly foggy horror game.
Winter is here
Having realized a few of the issues that were projecting a different atmosphere for the scene, I corrected my progress and started down the right direction for what I had in mind. After adding another light source and manipulating the values to give it an appropriately gloomy and cold hue, I was able to observe an issue that wasn't particularly visible in the previous configuration. The trees in the scene have a material that is built off of my shader for snow accumulation, but my lighting calculations were incorrect, which resulted in seemingly transparent trees. I was able to recalculate my lighting to more correctly represent specular highlights and shadows on my trees, such that trees may now look correct, cast correct shadows, and still simulate the build-up of snow over time. At the moment of writing, the snow feature is still in development.
Putting it all together
After writing a few additional shaders to help the rest of the environment blend together, I had to synchronize their various properties over time so that the snow and snow coverage would look appropriately close, even for an accelerated demonstration of a snow storm. I also replaced a few of the trees so I'm not simply reusing the same two trees in different orientations. This more closely resembles my intended plan for the project, and the end result can be seen below.