Liminal Bog - Stylized Environment

Main references

Idea

My main inspiration for this environment came from the book Piranesi from Susanna Clarke, which is about a scientist in an infinite, liminal labyrinth. Merging this inspiration with my fascination of swamps and abandoned overgrown buildings made me really excited to work on this project.

Soon I found reference images for the swamp, the color scheme and the buildings and I got to work!

Process

Pipeline

Blockout

At first I blocked out my HDRP scene in Unity. I made a ground plane, basic trees and buildings out to get the composition right.

Modular assets

I modeled and unwrapped the needed assets for the buildings in blender. Later on, I sculpted tiling bark for the trees.

Scene setup

Back in Unity I set up the lighting for the scene, baked reflection probes and adaptive light probes, added basic vegetation and built up the buildings out of the modular assets. I continued working on the vegetation shaders for the lily pads, grass, bushes and trees. I then added glowing particles for fireflies and particles for the ground fog.

Textures

Using the sculpted bark texture I made a texture. Additionally, I made textures for the modular assets.

Finishing touches

After adding an animated firefly which is flying along a spline I polished the composition, made finishing touches to the post processing and added sounds and music. Finally, I made sure that the scene was properly optimized by adjusting LOD distances, enabling static batching and gpu instancing and editing shadow cascades.

Modular assets

Breakdown of main shader and VFX graphs

Water shader

In this shader you input the base color, the smoothness and a normal map. The normal map is applied two times and you adjust the layering with a lerp property. Additionally, you can adjust the speed, offset and tiling of the normal map to achieve the stylized movement of water.

Vegetation shader

In this shader you can use a custom alpha texture for the vegetation. You can decide if you want to use a solid color or the color of the alpha texture.
For movement there is the basic wind sway where you can adjust the speed, intensity and how much of the mesh is affected. Added to that is the wind waves which move according to an added texture, where you can adjust the scale of that texture, the speed and the contrast.
In the emission there is the fresnel effect as well as the depth coloring. You can choose the emission color and intensity for vegetation that is near the camera, and emission color and intensity for vegetation that is further away from the camera. Of course the distance is freely adjustable as well.
Finally, for the base color you can choose a gradient color and the height of said gradient.

Vegetation shader

In this shader you can use a custom alpha texture for the vegetation. You can decide if you want to use a solid color or the color of the alpha texture.
For movement there is the basic wind sway where you can adjust the speed, intensity and how much of the mesh is affected. Added to that is the wind waves which move according to an added texture, where you can adjust the scale of that texture, the speed and the contrast.
In the emission there is the fresnel effect as well as the depth coloring. You can choose the emission color and intensity for vegetation that is near the camera, and emission color and intensity for vegetation that is further away from the camera. Of course the distance is freely adjustable as well.
Finally, for the base color you can choose a gradient color and the height of said gradient.

Vegetation shader

In this shader you can use a custom alpha texture for the vegetation. You can decide if you want to use a solid color or the color of the alpha texture.
For movement there is the basic wind sway where you can adjust the speed, intensity and how much of the mesh is affected. Added to that is the wind waves which move according to an added texture, where you can adjust the scale of that texture, the speed and the contrast.
In the emission there is the fresnel effect as well as the depth coloring. You can choose the emission color and intensity for vegetation that is near the camera, and emission color and intensity for vegetation that is further away from the camera. Of course the distance is freely adjustable as well.
Finally, for the base color you can choose a gradient color and the height of said gradient.

Vegetation shader

In this shader you can use a custom alpha texture for the vegetation. You can decide if you want to use a solid color or the color of the alpha texture.
For movement there is the basic wind sway where you can adjust the speed, intensity and how much of the mesh is affected. Added to that is the wind waves which move according to an added texture, where you can adjust the scale of that texture, the speed and the contrast.
In the emission there is the fresnel effect as well as the depth coloring. You can choose the emission color and intensity for vegetation that is near the camera, and emission color and intensity for vegetation that is further away from the camera. Of course the distance is freely adjustable as well.
Finally, for the base color you can choose a gradient color and the height of said gradient.

Vegetation shader

In this shader you can use a custom alpha texture for the vegetation. You can decide if you want to use a solid color or the color of the alpha texture.
For movement there is the basic wind sway where you can adjust the speed, intensity and how much of the mesh is affected. Added to that is the wind waves which move according to an added texture, where you can adjust the scale of that texture, the speed and the contrast.
In the emission there is the fresnel effect as well as the depth coloring. You can choose the emission color and intensity for vegetation that is near the camera, and emission color and intensity for vegetation that is further away from the camera. Of course the distance is freely adjustable as well.
Finally, for the base color you can choose a gradient color and the height of said gradient.

Vegetation shader

In this shader you can use a custom alpha texture for the vegetation. You can decide if you want to use a solid color or the color of the alpha texture.
For movement there is the basic wind sway where you can adjust the speed, intensity and how much of the mesh is affected. Added to that is the wind waves which move according to an added texture, where you can adjust the scale of that texture, the speed and the contrast.
In the emission there is the fresnel effect as well as the depth coloring. You can choose the emission color and intensity for vegetation that is near the camera, and emission color and intensity for vegetation that is further away from the camera. Of course the distance is freely adjustable as well.
Finally, for the base color you can choose a gradient color and the height of said gradient.

Liminal Bog - Stylized Environment

Main references

Idea

Process

Pipeline

Modular assets

Breakdown of main shader and VFX graphs

Performance/Optimization breakdown