Japanese Cherry Blossom Diorama

Once we had finished our Sidescroller project and presented it, it was time to start another project. No rest for the wicked!

We were given a range of industrial briefs which we could choose from. So I decided to pick the diorama brief. I had to create a small diorama scene with a selection of small assets and one hero asset. For the scene I must have included the following Hero Asset (prop or vehicle), terrain piece and small props such as rocks and vegetation. We had 3 weeks to do this project and theme was determined by myself. There was no concept needed but a key image to work from at least.

The piece I decided to do was a Japanese Cherry Blossom Tree. I wanted to do this as my diorama piece because I knew for my FMP that was to come in the new year that I was going to work on a Japanese Garden. So I wanted to practice my tree modelling and texturing.

This is the key image that I used that I wanted to re-create for my diorama:

Key Image

First of all I started researching Japanese trees. I didn’t know exactly what type of tree I wanted to go for so I looked at a wide range and then felt strongest about a Japanese cherry blossom tree. I felt this would be good to practice. Once I had found my key image I went ahead and started to model my tree. I modelled it using splines and then path deforming the cylinder I created. I purposely went ahead and used a lot of tris first of all so I could then merge all the branches together so it flowed nicely into each branch. Once all the branches were merged I then went ahead and got rid some of the tris that weren’t needed and got rid of any n-gons. I took this into zbrush and worked into adding details such as bumps, folds and knots like a normal tree. I then used an alpha brush to add some texture. I then decided to start focusing up on the leaves. I created a high poly leaf which I then duplicated and FDD modified to make it slightly different to the rest. I then created two smaller high-poly branches in which I would then object paint the leaves on. I used the rump object paint so that the leaves towards the end of the branch would be smaller. Once I was happy with that I then went ahead and edited the leaves separately, so that there was no negative space. Once I had done that I then baked it down onto a plane so I could then use it for alphas later.

Once I have finished that I then went back to my main tree and baked down the high to low poly. Once I had done that I then went ahead and arranged my alpha branches on one singular low poly branch to then object paint on my tree. Once I had roughly painted my alphas onto my tree I manually rotated and moved them to fill in the space left.

I created my terrain by putting it into zbrush and then baking it down.

Once done I took it then into Unreal and worked in a particle system to create falling blossom. I took my plane of my blossom and then created an alpha in which I then created a particle effect to create a falling blossom. 

Final UE4 screenshot