Inspiration
So, the inspiration and the whole concept I found that made me want to make this diorama was by this great artist on dribbble 'JzhDesigner' and the scene they made was entitled Seaside cottage which you can find here.
I chose this concept not only because it was great but because I wanted this project to be quick in terms of development. Because a lot of the scene was mapped out, with some slight differences I could to a degree skip steps such as 'blockout' & 'whitebox' and go straight to set dressing and scene composition/layout.
Breakdown
As mentioned above I wanted this project to be quick but only to a certain degree. I still did a simple blockout in Maya for proportions, hooked up a camera for a shot and so on.
Below you will see a few shots of progression from start to finish, I didn't add them all as I created many different variations, some with different compositions, lighting, mood, scale, angle and so on.
Models
Below you will see some of the 3D models I modelled and textured for the diorama, if you're an avid unreal user or fellow artist you will see I used some Quixel Megascans assets to bulk up the scene some what. Fun fact I also experimented with Houdini and Speedtree for procedural foliage but I found it was taking too long and I wanted the development time to be as quick as possible. However, I might write up a blog post with my findings and results in the future.
Atmospherics, Effects & Lighting
Below you will see some of the atmospherics, effects, particles and so on to liven up the scene somewhat. For the fish I used a shoaling system I first developed in unity and ported over to unreal C++, I am planning on writing up a blog post about it starting with the unity side and then the port. Next up, for the fog I created a simple but not very optimal volumetric fog that animated to fly over the diorama. For the water I used unreal's water system in 4.26 and for the foam I used a simple animated material. The butterflies was a great asset on marketplace which you can find here and finally the cat was also a marketplace asset that you can find here.
The lighting was achieved through experimentation combined with post processing effects, I used unreal's exponential fog and its sky and atmosphere system with pp effects such as vignette, grain, color grading and so on.
Next Steps
There a few next steps I feel are worth exploring. One of them is realistic boat physics as much as I tried I couldn't get it working with such a small water plane using unreal's water system if the plane was much larger the physics were fine and nice looking. Another fix I didn't get round to was the polygonal edges of the water box mesh, I tried a more smoother look but it need much more finessing to look aesthetically pleasing. Finally, I think a night time version of the scene would be great, I will get round to that so keep tuned to this space and you may be surprised.
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