Yunnan Forest – Eduard Judin

Inspired by the striking rock formations of Yunnan’s Stone Forest, this diorama captures the harmony between nature and tradition.
It features detailed foliage and a hand-crafted paifang gate that reflects the region’s architecture.

All assets were modeled in Blender, with textures created in Substance Painter and Designer, and rendered in Unreal Engine 5.
All assets are game-ready.

Background

My goal was to create an environment focused on foliage and a natural setting, rendered in Unreal Engine.

I began by modeling the rocks, since they are the key element of the Yunnan Stone Forest. I aimed to make each rock look unique from different angles so they could be reused without appearing repetitive:

High- and low-poly of a bigger ground rock

high and low-poly of a characteristic tall rock

I started placing some of the rocks to shape an interesting composition:

First iteration

Final iteration

Once the composition was set, I moved on to creating the foliage — from bamboo trees in different sizes to a variety of grass types.

First I modeled some branches and textured them in Substance Painter

I bended my branches to make them look more organic

After that I baked the branches on a plane

I cut them out and added some more vertices

At the end I placed the branches on the tree trunk

To enhance the realistic look of the environment, I created a custom moss shader. The shader uses the normal map to determine which faces are oriented upward, and only those areas receive moss. Additionally, the shader includes a vertex-painting setup, allowing the moss to be manually added or removed in specific spots.