The Legend of Hyrule-s Castle

References and planning

This was my first Midterm where I had to make something out of a given theme, and the first one focusing on a specific aspect of a production pipeline. Since my goal is to become an environment Artist it was clear from the beginning that I was going to make some sort of environment. After finding out that our theme is going to be Nitendo, I had a short blockage of inspiration just because I never was a big consumer of their content.

After getting to know the Legend of Zelda a bit more (which I had never played before… I know what a deadly sin) I finally decided on creating a realistic version of Hyrule’s Castle, which also perfectly aligned with my interest in recreating interesting architecture in 3d. Going on a reference hunt I quickly found this amazing concept art by Raphael Lacoste. His matte painting inspired my final idea, which was to create a cinematic Trailer establishing shot for a movie i would call “The Legend of Hyrule’s Castle”.

As I already had learned the hard way from past projects: REFERECES IS EVERYTHING!

So, I went ahead and collected all the reference material I thought I was going to need, creating a mood board, and analyzing the concept art from Raphael Lacoste to understand the composition and his idea behind it. 

Additionally, I tried setting myself some goals for what new things I wanted to learn with this Midterm (since those intense one-week projects are always where I learn the most):

- Focusing on only 1 shot and making it as good as I can.
- Creating of a fully functional modular set using as few materials as possible
- Nailing the composition and layout of the shot
- Getting into the workflow of Speed Tree and Unreal Engine for Vegetation

The last step of my preparation is always to create a Time-Management plan so that I know what to do roughly on each day:

Blockout:

According to my goal of nailing the composition / layout of the shot the first thing I did was to work on my camera. I tried getting the main shapes and lighting down as quickly as possible. Placing cubes cylinders and simple landscape shapes really helped me to get a feeling for what the shot should look like.

After roughly half a day this was the first version I came up with:

Since I was quite happy with that for now, I decided to start working on a more refined castle blockout next. 

Castle Creation

As I wanted to create a fully Modular castle set, which should also safe me a lot of time modeling and texturing a huge amount of assets I first started by color coding the original Reference to get an idea of which pieces I had to model, and how they should fit together.

After that I brought my basic shapes from Unreal Engine into Maya and straight ahead rushed into the Modeling process which in of itself went quite well. Knowing that this asset will be in the background I held back quite a bit on the details I put into it and tried to keep the poly count rather low.

When it was finally time for UV’s and texturing, I had to experience my lack of knowledge in this kind of field. The goal was to use as few textures as possible, and not just go with the workflow of texturing all the Modules separately as I had done multiple times before. I wanted to create 2 trim sheet textures for the Castle and use them for all the Modules I had created. However, I did not know before this Project that It is clearly beneficial for creating such a Modular set, if one starts by creating the trim sheets before even Modeling the modules themselves.

This lack of knowledge then let to 2 and a half days of painfully creating my trim sheet layouts using Substance Designer to not only tile my strips on the trim textures horizontally but also vertically for some of them. (My best Friend for this task was this cool node called: “Non-Square Transform Grayscale” which allowed me to take f.e. 2 tiling 2k by 4k textures and merge them together into 1 4k texture map all withing Designer. The steps for this were to create a rough trim texture using really simple noises and tile generators in black and white, then using those maps to UV unwrap my modules and trying to adjust the topology to a point where the trim sheet would work with it, and then going back to Designer and finishing up the Materials.

Snapshot of one of the trim texture setups in Substance Designer:
The big blue Boxes on the left are the normal main Materials whose outputs then get pushed through an algorithm using “non-square transforms” to assemble the trim sheet for each map.

Breakdown Video of the trim sheets and their Layout of the Model:

Looking back at the creation process of this castle it was a harsh learning experience, and I am far from happy with how it turned out. Part of it is because of the workflow and approach I took, but the biggest disappointment came when I was finally done with all of it. My materials did not look to bad in Substance Designer and, they seemed alright on the breakdown cylinders, however the scale difference between my model and the small plane I created them on in Designer was too big, which I think is the reason for my textures looking bad on the final Model. Not to mention that this approach got rid of almost all the imperfections I would usually add to my models.

Assembly and polishing

To keep this section short, I then moved on to assembling the castle and the rest of the scene in Unreal Engine. Using Quixel Megascans for most of the environment and my castle modules I assembled the whole scene. Always looking through the camera and placing invisible boundary boxes helped me to focus only on the parts that are going to be visible in the final shot. This was a very fun process of placing assets, adjusting their colors, positioning, size etc. to create a cohesive image in the end.

This is the Scene I ended up with:

After that it was all about making it look as realistic and alive as possible. I went on to add decals and ivy on the castle, adding birds and making the vegetation move in the foreground. I replaced the foreground shadow blocker with moving tree shadows, added animated fog cards inside the castle and in the valley, and finally I quickly created a medieval banner to replace the horses that are visible in the original reference. This part really started to tie everything together, and bring this world to life.

Shot with all the movement added:

Learning for Future Projects

My biggest learning experience for this Project was the creation of the castle. Learning how to go about creating huge assets for environments has always been on my checklist, and this one brought me a step closer to my goal for sure.

For my next trim sheet / modular asset I now know how to think about and plan it beforehand. I will create the trim textures before I even start modeling. Also, I’ll make the modules more fitting to the size of the asset to avoid obvious repetition where it’s not necessary.

Another big learning experience was inside of Substance Designer itself, where I could clearly see my improvement even within the project from material to material which I created.

And last but not least my compositing skills at the end of this lacked quite a bit. I did learn how to create God rays using the 3d space in nuke (they just did not look good enough to add them to the shot). However, this opened my eyes on what the possibilities are on what to add to an environment using straight forward techniques in compositing. So, this will for sure be something I will work on in the future.

Although I am not quite happy with the final outcome of this project. I am glad for this experience and all the things I learned from it. I know that there is still a lot of things to improve on this one, starting with the castle shading, going on to some issues with some dark cliff parts, adding even more depth to the foreground, creating a better cloth simulation for the banner and adding some light rays shining on the castle are only a few things that come to mind.

Thanks for the read, and if you saw anything I should do differently on the technical side or want to share some creative feedback I am more to than happy to hear from you😊.

Software and Plugins used

Softwares:
- Maya for hard surface modeling
- Redshift in Maya for turntables
- Substance Designer for trim sheets
- Substance Painter and Designer for the banner texturing
- Houdini for banner simulation
- Unreal Engine 5.3 for scene assembly and rendering
- Photoshop and Davinci Resolve for video / photo editing

Unreal Engine Tools:
- Quixel Bridge for Landscape and Cliffs
- Background Birds from Unreal for VFX
- Foliage Vol.9 – Coyote Bushes from Dekogon Studios for Background Bushes
- Decal Champ for decals on castle
- Ultra Dynamic Sky – Everett Gunther for Sky

Other:
- Song: Times Goes By from Mike Kirin
- SFX: Artlist.io