Great Stone Castle

The Great Stone Castle was created as part of a team of 3 Environment Artists for Virtus Studios and Hivemind for release on the Unreal Marketplace. The project was completed in 28 days.

The scene includes a modular castle kit, with multiple towers, halls and dungeons. And town kit, with tavern, houses, shops, farms, roads and docks.

I lead the team on this project, producing research notes, moodboards, production plans, and dividing up work.

I produced the Castle modular kit. The modular kit is designed to work in tandem with a spline placement system, enabling the quick creation of any shape castle walls, without the need for many different Meshes. Once placed in the scene the spline walls are then baked to improve the in game frame rate. Several iterations of the main building kit were made in blockout, to test for useability and to make sure we could get the maximum number of configurations with the minimum number of pieces.

The final scene was composed by me, with the focus on creating a number of interconnecting views throughout. The wider scene was populated by the whole team. I built the final castle as seen in the level, it was populated with props and lit by my colleague. It is fully traversable with many floors and towers all connected.

For this project I also created and placed the foliage, working in Speedtree to create logs, bushes, and trees. Which were then cleaned up in Maya, ready for import and placement in unreal. Town buildings were created in a previous project.
Additionally this project takes full advantage of the material layers system, set up by a colleague and I. All the materials throughout the scene come from the same master material, with different functions applied through layer blends. We created blends for mesh specific masks, packed into RGB channels in substance painter. Vertex painting, where the colour channel for application can be assigned in each material instance. Noise blend, to break up large areas of tiling. And world aligned blend layer for projected textures.