Under The Stars

A stylized 3D environment and technical art project built in Unity (URP), Blender, and Substance Painter, featuring custom foliage wind shaders, animated crystal materials, and modular architecture.

UnityBlender3D ModellingGameShaders
Under The Stars screenshot

Overview

Under The Stars is a stylized 3D environment and technical art showcase developed in Unity (Universal Render Pipeline) by a two-person team. Inspired by the nocturnal color palettes and atmospheric lighting of Makoto Shinkai's Your Name, the project combines modular 3D modeling in Blender, hand-painted PBR texturing in Substance 3D Painter, and custom animated shaders built in Unity Shader Graph.

Tools & Technologies: Unity (URP), Shader Graph, Blender, Substance 3D Painter, HDRI Lighting

Technical Contributions & Systems Breakdown

1. Custom URP Shader Graph Pipelines

Animated Foliage & Tree Wind Shader

  • Procedural Tree Generation: Utilized Blender's Sapling Tree Generator to construct organic trunk and branch curves, converting them into optimized game-ready meshes with particle-instanced leaf clusters.
  • Vertex-Animated Leaf Shader: Authored a custom URP Shader Graph material that drives gentle wind-sway vertex displacement and stylized cel-tinted lighting across canopy foliage.

Tree treeGraph

Emissive & Animated Crystal Shader

  • Bioluminescent Crystal Material: Designed a custom Shader Graph for environmental crystals that blends emerald-green and violet emissive gradients with animated time-offset pulsing to contrast against the cool nocturnal terrain.

Crystal CrystalGraph

2. Modular 3D Asset Production & Baking

  • Bridge & Architectural Workflow: Established the scene's modular hard-surface workflow starting with the central bridge structure. Executed blockout modeling, high-poly detail sculpting, and low-poly retopology in Blender.
  • Stylized Texture Baking: Baked high-poly normal and curvature maps in Substance 3D Painter and authored hand-painted anime-styled albedo and roughness textures.

Bridge

3. Custom HDRI Skybox & Environmental Composition

  • Starfield Skybox Pipeline: Created a custom high-dynamic-range (HDRI) night skybox featuring dense starfields and nebula gradients, importing it into Unity to drive ambient scene illumination.
  • Visual Storytelling & Color Theory: Composed the terrain layout and analogous cool-toned lighting hierarchy so that warm lantern light and bioluminescent crystals naturally guide the viewer's eye across the bridge without UI markers.

Sky

Direct Impact

  • Cohesive Stylized Rendering: Pairing custom URP foliage and crystal shaders with hand-painted Substance textures achieved a unified anime-inspired aesthetic that ran smoothly in real time.
  • Reusable Modular Assets: Breaking architectural structures into modular components accelerated scene assembly and allowed flexible terrain dressing. CrystalGraph