Model Breakdown
Surroundings: Rock-wood-water environment, constructed in a spiritual space.
Buildings: Ancient Chinese architecture with temple style roof structure.
Arch roof structure referenced from ancient Chinese buildings.
Technical Shading
Foliage
Using Data Transfer - Custom Normals, foliage meshes' normals behaves as smooth clusters thus creating a comic style rendering.
This technique requires many compensatory lights to wipe out or add in shadows (with even negative lights).
During rendering, I found that foliage renders the best without AO, while other scenes requires AO ticked on.
My solution is rendering two times with different AO (and other necessary) settings, and compositing them together.
Using alpha holdout mask, I could render the foliage and other environment separately, and combine two shots in compositing pass.
Procedural Toon Shading
For the natural surrounding, I procedurally generated the grass/moss texture using vertex normal, noise and color gradient.
Then I multiplied the texture with toon shading flattened diffuse color.
Finally, I crafted a procedural shader for the water surface as well.
Hard surface Practice
Fire Hydrant
Vacuum for VR
I created this asset for hand held weapon in VR environment.
First, I created a high poly version, and I baked the normal onto the low poly version.
After assigning the ID, I created the texture in Substance Painter.
simulation
Using Flip Fluid Blender addon, I created this beach scene with wave simulation.
I added a custom vertex shader for the rocks. The wet and dry area dynamically changes and shows different shading under the sunlight.