Whilst searching for inspiration, I came across a piece of concept art by Sergey Zabelin called “Castle in a snowy forest”. This piece was the foundation for the mood and layout of my scene. I adapted a lot of things, added my own storytelling and completely shifted the design of the castle, but there are still elements of this piece that were carried into my scene.

It was around this time that I also came across an 80 Level article written by Leah Augustine about her project, Snowy Forest. The breakdown led me to a lot of the resources I used in my project. It answered many of my initial questions about the technical problems involved with snow and provided me with a great foundation to start my own project.

Landscape

Creating my landscape and landscape material was my first step. I came across Jacob Norris’ Forest Snow Ground tutorial where he goes through the process of creating snow materials in Substance Designer, then creating a landscape material in UE4. He also covers a lot of useful technical knowledge and variables to consider when making your own material. He made the tutorial free, but you can always send some money his way if you find it helpful.

Blocking Out the Scene

I started by using Sergey’s concept as a foundation for blocking out my scene. After setting up a camera, I began sculpting the rough forms onto the landscape using UE4’s inbuilt terrain tools. The next step was to block out some of my mountain shapes to get a rough idea of the hill in the foreground and some of the mountains in the backdrop.

I used Gaea to create my mountains, gave them a very rough erosion material and place them in the scene. Although these were changed or made less important in the overall scene, they helped cover the horizon and make the location feel more plausible.