Zelda Oneiric Solace - Game Concept

Zelda Oneiric Solace is the next chapter on The Legend of Zelda series... or at least it could be. This is my latest project, but this time I didn't want to only make a 3D scene, I wanted it to look like an official announcement. So I studied Zelda's latest releases' visual identity: from their art direction to the their marketing material and editing style of their trailers. I modeled and textured everything from scratch, did some animation work, edited a trailer, and came up with a title and a logo. I got to a result that hopefully looks like the announcement of a new Zelda game for the next generation of Nintendo consoles.

Almost everything about the development of this project was outside my comfort zone: lately I've been trying to do more organic models, so for this project, I made an entire bamboo forest. I looked up animation tutorials for the leaf falling, as I learned that's a common beginner's animator exercise. I'm no animator, but I think I did a pretty good job with the leafs and the flower. I'm not 100% satisfied with the final result, as there are some lighting artifacts that you can spot if you're looking for them, but otherwise I'm pretty damn happy.

I chose to do a bamboo forest since it's not a biome that we usually see on Zelda games, at least not at this scale. It was also a practical choice since I only had to make a few variations of the bamboo trees and their textures, then duplicate, rotate and scale them to make a believable looking forest. I also took some branches and placed them on the ground around a few trees. There are only 4 bamboo models and 3 texture variations in the entire scene, and it took me only a few hours to populate the whole forest.

The terrain is composed of 3 layers: a dirt plane and 2 layers of leaves. The leaf layers share the same material but they have a different offset. Their tiles are about the size of a square around the Triforce pedestal, and they tile through the entire scene. Speaking of the pedestal, the leafs around it have their own custom material, so the leafs don't clip on the rock, as you can see on this project's 3D viewer. Since it's the central part of the scene, it deserved special attention.
To make the tiling not obvious to the eyes, I used a height map as displacement; and that coupled with the shadows between the layers, the elevation of the terrain and all the bamboo; it eliminated the tilling effect.

As for the lighting, I used a lot of fog, as it seems to be a constant on the recent Zelda titles. It ads to the mystique of the forest. Also, the fact the forest where the Master Sword is hidden has a lot of fog is lore accurate. The sunset light cuts through the thick fog and the bamboo trees and leafs, and makes these strong diagonal volumetric ilghts that only add to the "oneiric" theme of this scene.

This project took me about 10 days, working a couple hours everyday. It's definitely one of my favorites. I learned a lot during its development and I'll bring my new skills to my next projects.