Zen Diorama // 01



Now that I have some free time I decided to start a new project. The project's name is 'Zen Diorama', and is inspired by my yoga and mindfullness practise that has become an integral part of my life over the past year.

The project focuses on a small area consisting of a room with a window, populated with only a few items, including a yoga mat, a table and three objects that are placed on the table. 

The purpose of this project is to take inspiration from mindfulness by slowing down and allowing myself the time to learn the 'movement' opposed to focusing on the end product. This will give me chance to focus on some high quality materials and assets, while also polishing my Unreal skills.

The main inspiration for this project comes from an image that I found on pinterest.


The image shows a well-lit room with a lot of small details to work from. I'll be attempting to nail the lighting using Unreal 4. This gives me a great opportunity to learn about screen space reflections and other lighting techniques.

I also gathered reference from my room, which as very similar lighting, and began compiling a colour palette.


Defining a colour palette early helps me create a clear vision of what I want the end product to resemble. I got this idea from Clinton Crumpler's King Wash Lundromat lvl 80 post.


i chose a very calming, earthy palette and then threw a bright orange in there to inject some playfulness into the scene It's also the colour of my yoga mat.

This is also my first time using a Trello board for managing a project. I'd highly recommend you try it out!

I moved onto creating a block out in Unreal. I focused on ensuring the lighting was 'correct' so that I didn't have to fiddle and bake with longer build times later on down the pipeline.


I started in grayscale but began to add some basic colours when I felt confident with the lighting. it took me a few iterations to get the proportions correct.

Finally, I established 3 camera angles so that I knew exactly where things should be placed in the scene to ensure consistency throughout the scene. I feel like this is where I went wrong with my previous project.



I've learned that it's better to know pretty much where everything needs to be in a scene before wasting time on useless assets.

I have some artefact issues to resolve, but I'm pretty much ready to begin on replacing the block out with assets.

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