DEEPWOOD HOKORA
Unreal Engine Short Film
Project Overview
A boy is magically shrunk to the size of a thumb and finds himself lost in the deep forest. He folds a paper boat and drifts down a shimmering golden river, hoping to trace his way back. Suddenly, a miniature shrine emerges. A girl in a flowing furisode sits leisurely on the eaves, her eyes filled with astonishment and curiosity. In a flash, she transforms into a fox spirit and vanishes into the woods.。
Softwares Used
Photoshop, Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Maximo, Quixel Megascans, Unreal Engine, Premiere Pro
Trailer
Screenshots
Process
The inspiration comes from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland—Alice follows a white rabbit down a hole, drinks a potion to shrink, and eats a cake to grow larger. I used one of my unfinished illustrations as a starting point and transformed this scene into a 3D short film.
Workflow:
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Scene Setup: Used assets from Sketchfab and Quixel Megascans for the initial layout, setting up camera focal length, depth of field, and shake parameters in Sequencer.
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Model Replacement & Refinement: Gradually replaced placeholder assets with custom models and iterated on-scene details, adding fog and volumetric lighting.
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VFX: Added effects such as falling leaves, fireflies, and dust using the Niagara system.
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Post-Processing: Adjusted the overall tone using Color Grading LUT in Post Process Volume, and added Lens Dirt Mask Texture for extra lens details.
During the texturing phase, I aimed to maintain a balance between realism and a stylized style to ensure that the characters stand out within the scene.
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In Substance Painter, I created a moss material that generates based on AO, Height, and Position Maps, and used Curvature to add wood worn edges.
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For character animation, I used Mixamo with manual adjustments in Maya. The rigging for the fox, shimenawa, and bells was done using Advanced Skeleton, while the hemp rope and zigzag paper strips were simulated with Unreal Engine's built-in cloth system.
While working on the fox material, I encountered an issue with incorrect color blending between the foreground and background in Translucent Shading. I resolved this by reading the mesh depth to enable backface culling, then multiplying this function with the fade-out animation to achieve a gradient transparency effect.
Additionally, I developed a moss generation tool inspired by a volumetric snow generation tool from YouTube:
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Used Raycast to randomly or grid-distribute points on the surface of objects, determining moss coverage and density.
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Remeshed the generated spheres and merged them.
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Added Displacement Maps and Noise Maps for finer details.
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Generated UVs, overlaid Normal Maps, and adjusted edge stretching.
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Exported the static model.
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Used Foliage to paint fluffy leaves onto the moss model.
