Personal Cinematic Scene: The Gate

I revisited one of my older works and refined both the materials and the overall scene.
The gate was inspired by Elden Ring, where I wanted to capture the breathtaking moment when players first saw the Erdtree. To echo that feeling, I used a warm, golden color scheme and added fantasy elements with emissive materials and glowing birds emerging from the gate.

The layout was first blocked out in Maya, and I enhanced the scene with assets from Sketchfab and Quixel. I created the main tree and the ivy on the statue in SpeedTree. For the blue gate, I originally planned to use a particle system for a dissolve effect, but instead achieved it in a more simple way- with a shader using the default noise map. The flock of birds was built with Niagara, using World Position Offset to create simple flying motion without traditional animation.