This project was for me to demonstrate my stylized foliage creation skills as well as learn more about making shaders (specifically for water).
Many thanks to all the encouragements I got in multiple gamedev/3d art discord servers I'm in as well as especially to Tyler Reed and Randall Villegas again for their advice, suggestion and words of wisdom ^v^, as well as Cameron Meyer for help on particles and to Eric Grossman for his extensive list on how I can present this piece better.
Everything was made from scratch by me except the rocks/boulders are from https://www.tinytalismangames.com/
I referenced Anna Kharlamova's concept art: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nXAq9
Foliage:
I first found the fluffy stylized tutorial by Johannes Burström through Stylized Station on YouTube. He found a tutorial for stylized trees that used for Unity and converted to Unreal. There was not much in-depth explanation on how he did that so I did some research myself and played around in Unreal to get what I have here.
River Shader:
I referenced a lot of different water shaders tutorials. I learned a lot about making shaders in general and I know I can definitely improve upon this one and make it more efficient and less costly. Definitely was really hard making this one the exactly I'd like but through many trial and error, researching how others have done it and asking for advice from artists in that expertise, this is the final result/
primarily used a billboarding technique I found on YouTube that is used in Unity. (more details in the description)