Most up to date progress:
Still planning to update some elements in this video, but it’s my most most current, full length capture.
Hello everyone, this project came from an unlikely source of inspiration. The 2026 FIFA world cup took place in North America. This resulted in a series videos being posted across social media where non-Americans were showing excitement about things in the USA.
I happened upon a video of a European girl visiting Snoqualmie falls, which is a location I have visited before as well. I really loved the shapes being created by the water and mist coming off the falls in this video and wanted to see if I could replicate these things.
Most of my professional work over the last few years has been more in the stylized realm, so this sounded like a good opportunity to work on a more realistic personal project, which I haven’t done in quite a while.
I’m actually quite far along in the project at the time of me making this post, but since I took progress pics and videos along the way, I’ll do my best to share how things developed, from start to finish.
And of course, feedback, questions, and critiques are all welcome!
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Here is a capture of some of the photo reference I was working from for this project. I also have many videos of the falls saved on my computer.
In my reference search, I really fell in love with the composition and overall look of this photo and decided to base my project around that look.
In order to accomplish this, it also meant I’d need to do some environment work and couldn’t just focus on only the waterfall. Since I was planning to use Unreal for this project, that meant I could use things like Nanite, Lumen, and Nanite foliage, so that gives me quite a head start over the old days of how time consuming it can be to optimize environment assets, make lightmap UVs, and bake static lighting etc. So I decided to jump in and see what I could do.
So, in order to get started I needed to create a quick environment to start blocking out my waterfall and the river. I knew that I could possibly just sculpt a landscape in unreal to match my reference images, but that would probably take a good chunk of time, so I decided to see if I would pull real-world heightmap data online from Snoqualmie falls.
So, after some research, I found Tangrams heightmapper, lined up the image with Snoqualmie falls, and exported a heightmap.
It looked something like this:
Then I used that image to create a landscape in unreal that looked like this:
This required a bit of manual smoothing, but that went pretty quick.
I didn’t want to spend too much time on details at this point, so I grabbed a free landscape auto material from the Fab marketplace and that got me to where things looked like this.
One thing that I was mindful about, was that heightmaps don’t usually result in particularly accurate sheer cliffs, at least not in unreal. Snoqualmie has what appear to be some vertical drop offs. So I knew I’d need to go in and do some manual sculpting to tweak things to better match my reference.
At this point I was able to get started on the waterfall and river setup though.
