Castle Approach

This environment was made for a 4-week art portfolio assignment at PlaygroundSquad!

My personal goal was to create an impressive & detailed outdoor environment that would invoke a feeling of being part of an enormous world, heavily inspired by Dark Souls & Elden Ring.

Through the process I learned a lot about keeping a manageable scope, and I gained a lot of knowledge about technical art to accomplish what I wanted.

Video fly-through

Technical Breakdowns

For the Castle wall materials, I developed a master shader with vertex painting options.

The red channel would represent moss, the green for general dirt, and blue for soot from the fires. I used Unreal Engine's built in tools for vertex painting to control where the textures would be applied, using tiling PBR textures I created in Substance Painter from scratch.

I developed modular castle assets and used Unreal Engine marketplace packs for the foliage & terrain assets. Due to the time constraints, my main priority was developing as few assets as possible for the center piece of the environment, and making the most out of it, and re-using them where applicable to achieve the feeling of a huge environment you would want to explore more of outside the confines of the viewable areas.

I originally sketched the vague concept on paper, and proceeded to block out the environment in-engine as early on as possible. Lighting and cameras underwent many changes throughout the process until I found the sweet spot. I then had time left over and set my ambitions higher to develop areas beyond the initial camera angle, to fill out the environment further.