[WIP] Gates of Angband

jrigaldies

Hey everyone,

I'd like to share a project I've started working on recently: The fortress of Angband and Thangorodrim from The Silmarillion. The scene is meant to be my own interpretation of what the fortress exterior would have looked like during the time period after the Nirnaeth Arnoediad and before the War of Wrath (i.e. the height of Morgoth's power in Beleriand).

My quality focus is generally for higher end game environments, and I'll be utilizing Megascans assets and textures throughout the project. I'm going to be using UE5 and Nanite where I can as well. Once finished, I aim to have several cinematic shots and a fly-by video or two.

For the moment, I've put together the scene with some blockout meshes, toyed around with some Megascans rocks and cliff assembly, and put together a few materials for them (since they're essentially ready to go as is). I've yet to decide how to model and texture the mountain slopes, but the concept shown below is a good start.

Based on almost every piece of concept art I could find about what the exterior gates/towers might look like, I settled on having three main towers that imitate the three peaks of Thangorodrim. I also wanted to have the steep slopes a bit closer to the structures/gate to give a better, and perhaps more literal, feeling towards the description of "the towers of Thangorodrim" (some concepts have the volcanoes in the distance).

Below is a better representation of scale. The larger mannequin in the back is representative of Morgoth's size (During his duel with Fingolfin it's discussed that he may have been somewhere in the realm of 25 ft to 60 ft tall, but open to interpretation). I settled around 60 ft in height for the purpose of grandeur, but I may adjust things later.

Below is a zoomed out view of the total scene. I'll probably stay well within this scope as the distances are huge based on Tolkien fandom calculations/speculations, and I've already scaled the mountain peaks down a good bit.

Critiques are welcome, of course, and I'll be happy to explain everything if there are questions. I'll also try to keep these camera views consistent as I update to project.

Thanks, and I hope you enjoy the process!

jrigaldies

A few updates:

1. Adjustments and additions to the structure.
2. Further rock, slope, glacier, and mountain assembly.
3. Some texturing experimentation.
4. Some vfx testing.

And a quick note on the lava textured rocks, which I quite like the result of:

I wanted to add some more material variation to the Megascans assemblies and set up cavity mask function that works well with the textures they provide. The concept is similar to an inverse up-vector mask like those that are used for snow masks. A breakdown is below, with an example of what that mask can look like before final adjustments using parameters.

And finally, testing out the eruptions of the volcanoes:

https://youtu.be/pzPK1VYcTjs

This is using a few variations of a 3x3 flip book texture in Niagara. For a first iteration I'm happy with how it turned out.

Klawd

Damn, great subject!. And nice start on it. I like the scale you are going for. Keen to see updates

jrigaldies

A few more updates:

1. More scale adjustments to the scene. The background mountains/Thangorodrim are stupid huge at this point, but I'll probably keep them out of frame to give a better feel of being mysteriously gargantuan.
2. Some initial texture passes on the walls and metal pieces.
3. Further blockout adjustments of the towers and walls.
4. More rocks.
5. Pits and scaffolding.
6. Lava for flavor?
7. Slight lighting changes.

Here are some of the tiling materials I've started to toy around with for the structures. There's a lot of brown in the scene already, so I'll work on color adjustments soon.

I wanted to breathe some more life into the scene, so I've added some pits and initial scaffolding to serve as a glimpse of the orc industry that flourished underground at the time.