Bonfire Lit: A Dark Souls Tribute

Bonfire Lit: A Dark Souls Tribute

This is a fan art depicting one of the most beautiful locations in videogames, the Firelink Shrine from Dark Souls. All credit goes to Hidetaka Miyazaki and FromSoftware who created this masterpiece.

Sound on! Firelink Shrine in Dark Souls has an amazing atmosphere in big part due to the serene music by Motoi Sakuraba used in the video.

Progress board showing blockout, first mesh and texture passes, early lighting and the finished scene. Scattered fog cards tied the scene together nicely.

Despite leveraging the power of Lumen in UE5, I ended up using quite a lot of point and spot lights to get the final scene where I wanted. Lighting is my favourite part of the process so it was great fun.

I utilized the UE5 modelling tools to displace Megascan heightmaps onto a subdivided mesh. This provided me with a nice base for a full pass in Zbrush.

For most of the assets I opted to use an RGB mask to drive two or three 1k tiling textures that are blended in shader. This helped keep a nice texel density especially on huge assets like the aquaduct or cliffs.

Very special thanks to my mentor Jeremy Estrellado who guided me throughout this project. My sincere thanks also to Casper Wermuth who provided me with invaluable feedback right at the end of the project.