QUICK SUMMARY:

Project – Recreating the forest scene of the Alan Wake 2 Reveal – with Quixel Assets, own 3D creations and put everything together in a short trailer.

What I did – Building the whole scene from scratch, studying the trailer to rebuild the mood, atmosphere and object placements. I also dived into shader creation to simulate the wind moving the fabrics – done via normal map animation and tesselation.

The scene is originally done by Remedy Entertainment.

The project is divided in two parts – the presentation in the first half (with renderings and videos) and a workflow breakdown in the second half.

I. Renderings And Presentation

If the video looks skewed, please open it via left-click on the title above in Youtube.

---

II. The Blockout And Workflow

I used PureRef and screenshots of the trailer to start with the blockout in Unreal 4.

The blockout came quickly together and I soon started looking for the right assets inside the Quixel Bridge. I planned every stage of the project and once I downloaded a myriad of fitting assets I moved on to sculp the landscape (I once again used OpenLand).

A great addition to my project were the new Quixel Trees, the first fully scanned trees – though still in early access they worked great to populate the background and foreground of the scene.

After the basic layout of the scene was done and I played around with the lighting, built up the fog and set up the camera, I started with more complex issues of the scene – the corpse and police assets.

I posed a mannequin inside Unreal and exported it to 3DsMax and used cloth animation to hide the body under the sheets. I thought it would look more horrifying if only a few details of the corpse were visible.

I created the police flyers and notes also in 3DsMax and created the textures with Photoshop. But something was missing – the police band needed to move. I used shader tessellation to make the corpse fabric and police line flap in the wind.

Here is a quick timeline.

The project is a fan recreation and was not endorsed by Remedy Entertainment – 2022.