Crystal cave environment I created based on a digital painting I did. This piece was quite popular among my viewers, so I decided to create and Unreal 5 environment based on it.
My process
I started off with creating the basic landscape in Unreal engine 5, followed by the textures and water. My reference was to match the digital painting as closely as I can.
Then I modeled the top of the cave and placed it in the scene. I'm going for the curved ceiling tunnel look.
Next I found some starter pack rock assets and incorporated them into the cave. This took a lot of placement and making sure it worked well in the scene and looked as natural as possible. I also gave the water an emissive boost to add to the magical feel of the scene.
With a couple changes here and there. i started working on the crystals. I used a few different materials for the crystals, to give them some variety. I ended up liking a material most that had more depth and reflection with the camera movement. The crystal material setup I found through tutorials online.
Next I added some glow worms in the ceiling. Using simple models and shaders. I had to dim it down a bit to make sure it wasn't over powering the crystal glow. I modeled some stalagmites as well to add more visual interest and believability in the water cave.
Next I know I wanted to add something interesting at the end. So I created a waterfall. My first waterfall was with Niagara particles. Though aside from it getting kind of heavy for the scene, it didn't capture the look and feel of water.
So I decided to model the basic shape of the water5fall and use a masked translucent texture that was animated with the panner node. I duplicated the waterfall model to layer it up. Where I added variations of the waterfall materials each with slightly different color, opacity, speed. To make the waterfall appear more natural.
I then created Niagara particle effects where i added mist and the splash from the waterfall.
I then created Niagara particle effects where i added mist and the splash from the waterfall.
Effects, I wanted to indicate a light source in the scene that is shown in the original image. So I created a spirit orb that lights up the cave as it travels through. The effects are done in Niagara from a magic orb tutorial found online.
The Result
After everything put together along with some tweaks. this was the final result.