Ancient tree ruins

I wanted to create something with a fantasy mood, in a natural setup and with a magic twist.
So I started sketching shapes of trees covering church-like arches.

Sketching roughly my idea helped me finding the main shapes I wanted to work with.
So when I switched to 3D modeling I could more easily find what I wanted.

Here's the first tree I sculpted and how I progressively learned to make it something interesting.

After I set up the main idea, I extracted different elements from the illustration to practice on prop design, focusing on trees, vegetation and ruin parts. I explored how the rest of the forest could be, detailing plants and establishing the scale of the different elements.

Ruins are the perfect way to convey storytelling, and in this case a familiar yet fantastic architectural structure.
The altar, wich is not visible in the illustration, seemed to be the key element to the story here, and an interesting asset to include.

Treasure chests designs seem to be an important aspect of the prop design, video game wise.
So I thought it could be interesting to synthesize the visual aspects I explored earlier for my ruin parts to create something that could be interactive in a game design perspective.

I learned so many things while working on this project, and I think it's a good start.

Thank you for taking the time to look through my work, I hope you liked it !