This time I’m goin to be attempting to create a Ruined Tower Belonging to a Certain Maimed Vampire ( Concept Art by one of my School Mates ArtStation - aethernia_ )
This will be a bit tricky because I only have 6 weeks to complete everything but I’m going to give it my best shot.
Last week I worked on my blockout and modelled some of the more repeated meshes.
Made Dead trees with the new MegaTrees Feature in ue 5.7 and setup a BP to populate trees in my level.
Made a Mesh Spline BP to be able to blockout some areas
and just spent a ton of time modelling.
No Textures are in place yet, any color or texture you see is just visual help for myself.
Im still having difficulty Creating my Z-Up Material with proper normal Blending for my bigger Stone Assets, and Struggling with creating a realistic sinkhole where the castle has sunk in, and blocking out the surrounding area.
Pufff… busy week, did a ton of work which still feels like I haven’t done anything.
Changelog :
Did a First Lighting Pass with small revisions over the week for the spooky scary aesthetic
thought about the blockout and modelled/Sculpted a TON of assets.
Stone Steps ( stacks of 1,3,5,10 with variation )
Fountain
Deformed Statues ( from fab but destrroyed them furthermore while still maintaining the uvs so i can use the normal texture, Genius Nima moment )
Stone Bench
Urns
Plinths
Deformed My Gate
Changed the Bounding Fence
Make Creepy Crawler Vines for overgrowth
Destroyed one of the Bridges in the distance
Added Water to the Fountain
Started with Bevels and UVs on the Castle Assets ( Halfway Done )
Sculpted the Landmass and Broke them apart to give that distorted land feel.
Did vertex painting on the landmasses to separate the parts ( needs revision tho )
Assigned a World Aligned Texture on all the new Rocky Assets with their Personal Bake Normal Maps
As for stuff I’m still struggling with, I know the reference and original concept is very stylized and fantasy, but I want to make the environment feel very realistic and creepy at the same time, I feel like my lighting right now is going against that, I might need to change the Lighting to make it feel like Somewhere pseudo-Abandoned / Magnificence Lost and Bygone.
I Also Don’t Like the Trees right now, I Feel like Leafy Trees will Help with the abandoned mood i wanna go with.
Aside from that I Feel like Everything else will look much better once I’ve Textured Everythinng Properly.
altered a previously made fire niagara particle sim with green colors
Separated my gate into different parts and started texturing it in unreal ( took a whole day of work and alot of back and forth making the textures between maya, painter, sampler and unreal )
did the same treatment to the step rails outside the grounds
did another lighting pass and added volumetric fog rays to the scene
got rid of the previous blue hue on the lights
there were more things I wanted to do, but the texturing back and forth really halted the progress.
For next week
early optimization pass for lighting and textures ( the scene is running heavier than id like )
definitely changing the skulls, they’re too fake currently in my opinion.
Finishing my Z-up material
Continuing textures and might change the skulls on the gates and rails.
