Mystical Cave Environment

My Role As Environment Artist

As the trend of AI generated art become more apparent, like many others, I had the idea to create a real-time environment based on concept images generated by Midjourney AI. Using Midjourney AI, I fed its Discord bot with text-prompts including keywords such as:

“Unreal Engine 5”, “UE5 fantasy environment with volumetric fog”, “3D cave with water stream”, “Landscape photography”, “Dramatic mood lighting”, “Bioluminescent water”, “Cool tones”, “Overgrown foliage”, “Dead trees”, “Post-processing with bloom”, “Lumen”, “Nanite”, “Quixel megascans”, “Photorealistic”, “Highly-detailed”, “Screen-space reflections”, “4k”, etc.

While using this new method of concepting environments using AI, I was having difficulty creating a consistent set of concept images from different angles due to the high amount of variation each time the AI is fed the same text-prompt. To overcome this, I chose which aspects from each concept image I thought would work best with the final concept image pictured above. Some of the aspects borrowed from other concept images I generated using AI include the sandy entrance, the mysterious man floating in the light, and the abundance of neon butterflies which can be seen in the final concept image as simple lights.

In Blender, I imported the final concept image as a reference and used the Unreal Engine default mannequin to get an accurate proportional scale of the cave. Once I set up the camera to frame the reference image, I modeled the cave using a hollow cylinder and aligned the cylinder mesh along the cave walls in the image. To add detail to the cave mesh I used a subdivision modifier to subdivide the mesh’s faces, and a displace modifier to offset vertices and create a bumpy surface. I initially had trouble figuring out the length of the cave, but after adding cubes to represent the boulders I was able to accurately recreate the size.

Before building the environment in UE5, I made an asset list including all the assets that I would need to collect from Quixel Megascans, these assets included ground, rocks, and foliage. When collecting these assets through Quixel Bridge, I avoided any assets that overly contrasted each other, and strived to create a more natural appearance by choosing plant types that could be found next to each other. For the ground of the cave, I initially created and sculpted a UE5 landscape to use as a positioning guide for the individual Quixel ground assets. After trying multiple strategies, I found that the quickest way to place ground Megascans was to layout the assets in a flat grid and position them along the landscape guide in rows, and then individually if I needed to. As I painted the foliage I began by adding the larger details first like the trees and the overgrown shrubs by the river, then I worked my way down to the smaller details like the grass, mushrooms, rocks, and bones. By starting from the larger details, I avoid over-dressing the set with too many small details which tend to drown out the more important aspects of the environment. Although the use of premade Quixel Megascans assets sped up my process of creating the environment, a reoccurring challenge I faced which slowed down my process was creating a cohesive atmosphere that allowed fantasy elements to be integrated without interrupting the realism of the level. In retrospect, spending more time brainstorming during the early design stages of the level design would have made the environment more cohesive and would have sped up the building process.

In the final concept image, the blue lights in the background gave me the idea to create a group of neon butterflies using a Niagara particle system in UE5. In Blender I created a butterfly mesh and took it into UE5 where I manipulated the mesh’s wings to look wavy. I achieved this by editing its material to use a looping grayscale gradient texture that would move up when dark, and move down when light. Additionally, I added a looping gradient to the material which used the colors of the butterfly texture to cycle through and emit its own emissive neon colors as it flapped its wings.