The Church of Light

The Church of Light

Real-Time Environment created for the Medieval Back and Forth challenge.

Original concept from Nikita Kamaev (portfolio)

I've used this mostly to work on my modular workflow and to familiarize myself more with Substance Designer.

The trims, Kit pieces and Misc. Assets were all modeled in Maya. 

The Modular stuff is all low-to-mid poly while the other assets use a classic High Poly bake. 

The modular kits were assembled in UE 5.2 and made into packed level instances to simplify the populating of the main scene.

External assets include Cliffs from Brushify Cliff pack, Trees and Foliage from Megascans and the Lighting comes from Ultra Dynamic Sky.

Final Piece

Concept Art

Final Render / Lighting Pass

Fly-through

Details

Landscape

The landscape has been generated with Gaea to get a natural looking landscape as a base. Then, I applied an Auto-Material which I made earlier this year according to a tutorial from CG Dealers.

As stated above, I used Megascans for the procedural meshes.

I then hand sculpted the mountains of the fore and mid ground in Unreal according to the placement of my main concept shot. I've ha to mess with the camera placement and settings a bit to get it looking as close as possible. (Picture 2)

Next step was to add some photoscanned meshes from Megascans and the Brushify - Cliffs Pack to the vertical stone cliffs of my landscape to breakup the texture and give it a more natural and pleasing shape. (Picture 3) 

Lastly, I added the Distance Meshes (from Brushify), used the Landscape Splines in Unreal to make a path by distributing a dirt-textured plane on it's segments and started placing my first modular house drafts. (Picture 4) 

Closeups

Houses

Different models of houses were made from modular pieces comprised of planes and cubes. 

The wooden beams have been sculpted in zbrush to give them a more organic shape and some height details. This is one part I would love to work on more, since it was also my initiation to zbrush. 

Also in Zbrush, I sculpted 6 rocks to assemble a turn into a tiling texture for the walls. I ended up replacing this texture because I felt it looked too stylized for the look I was going for.

The modules where then assembled in Packed Level Instances for easier populating of the Landscape and editing of the kits.

The final tiling textures were made in Substance Designer 

As trims, I used basic cubic pieces around the windows and doors, I used the 3 main beams and a couple of roof pieces modelled off of the roof tile texture.

The light from the church comes from Emissive meshes, a point light and 2 rectangle lights 

Some things I would have done differently

First off, I would've spent more time blocking out the scene. I learnt the importance of this part of the process by having to change the Landscape sized re scatter my assets multiple times.

Then, as much as I liked discovering  and messing with Substance Designer, I feel if I had the rights to use high quality textures (maybe I did, but I felt that was a bit of a gray area in the rules of the contest. Plus, I did want to learn how to make trim sheets and tilling textures) I could've spent more time refining the modular pieces and adding details to the different assets and would've been able to deliver something of a higher level of quality.

Finally, instead of using planes for the walls, I would've modelled actual bricks, as I did for the roof tiles to add some definition to my walls.

Additional images