Ancient Portals
This Unreal level started off as a recreation of one of the shots from the Avatar: The Way of Water trailer. After making it, I wanted to do more with it.
I chose to make it an ancient hub-world of sorts so users could go between worlds and return back. That gave me the idea to create the rocky structure that the video is filmed on. i wanted to give the area some more life and seem more grandiose by putting water on the cliffs to act like waterfalls.
The way this level would work would be that the user is on this rocky structure and has to navigate to whichever portal they want, which represented different levels. Once they complete the task in each level, one of the larger rings seen in the background would change by glowing. I didn't create that effect so I could focus on the smaller realms first but I wanted the user to enjoy exploring around. I added a day and night cycle to this map to sell the feeling of realism.
This level is made entirely of Quixel assets, save for the floating rock platforms which were downloaded online. the rings were made with a set of arches that were arranged in that manner so that you could see each one from the front and i added subsequent arches to extend the length. the stone structure along the bottom is also an arch. the stone cliffs in the background are enlarged limestone cliffs from Quixel which I indented to make room for the waterfall. the paths were a collection of Quixel rocks which I inverted so they'd have a bottom and then laid out in that kind of path.
The portals were each created by combining two arches each and using a unique texture made with cubemaps and reflection vectors. The water was made with the water body ocean preset.
Finally, I used Unreal's Quixel foliage, made a day and night cycle and used the same rotating camera in the desert video to film.
