Alien Planet Environment

For this piece, I started gathering some references to guide the overall look.

Once I have gathered some references, I started doing some "thumb-nailing" to sketch quick ideas to then do further iterations. 

 

After finding some ideas that I liked, I began to do a concept, first in black and white to get the values, and then added some colors. 

 

 

 

 

 

After getting the concept art for my idea, I started looking for the assets needed, in this case I used some assets from the Unreal Engine market and Kitbash3D, while other were made in Maya or Unreal Engine. 

 

The terrain asset is from Alien Planet I from the Unreal Marketplace, I added some directional lights to get started and tested some different textures to add a base color with a 2k resolution so it wouldn't be too taxing.

 

 

Added more lights, 1 skylight, and 3 spotlights to create more textures with the light directions.

 

 

Added post volume processing to get an even and stable distribution of tight. Also added exponential fog to add more drama and mystery to the shot.

 

 

Added a skybox mesh with some clouds, planets and other elements in the image so it looks like an alien planet.

 

 

 

The ancient temple: This was made with Kitbash3d assets "Elysium", the planets were made in Unreal with material and 2k texture for the far away planet, and 8k texture for the nearby planet.

 

I would still like to test with atmosphere and a HDRI for the stars.

 

Lights: I used 2 directional lights one for the main source of light "Sun" and another one to achieve the blue high contrast on the opposite side, at the bottom I used several point lights. Will test adding lights to the back to achieve more separation. This render is with Unreal Lumen in the movie render queue.