Luca A. Battiston - Modern Castle Ruins FMP

Luca_Bat

My ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/luca23
Wordpress: lucaslabstudio.wordpress.com

The aim of this project is to recreate the Belforte Castle (Trentino, Italy) in a dark fantasy setting, using original environment assets and shaders. The concept behind the project is Inspired by successful and acclaimed games such as Demon’s Souls (BluePoint Games, 2020), Silent Hill 2 (Konami, 2001), and Alan Wake 2 (Remedy Entertainment, 2023). Similarly to these games, the environment will feature a horror immersive atmosphere with dense fog which can create engaging scenarios and enemy encounters. The project will feature third-person gameplay and will blend elements from the modern and medieval world with a realistic style. This should create an interesting contrast that keeps the player engaged and wanting to explore the environment. 

Project Story

Following rumours of a new animal species discovered in the mountains near the small fictional city of Amara, a storm hits the town, and a mysterious fog engulfs the mountain peak. A scientist manages to arrive in the area only to find that the town is now almost deserted…​

The real-world reference of the castle ruins location:



Some of the video game art references that I use to shape the environment:

Image 1 - Jonathon Gregory Bick (ArtStation)


Image 2 - Anthony O'Donnell (ArtStation)

Luca_Bat

During the first phase I wanted to create a block out of the level and create a basic level design to get the main areas I would need to focus on during the development. Initially, I thought that I would incorporate my level design into a landscape using satellite height data. However, after a few tests which were successful, I decided to limit the size of the level to focus on smaller details. Some of the research has been documented on my blog for anyone who is interested on creating massive landscapes with satellite data: https://lucaslabstudio.wordpress.com/2024/04/30/practice-2-research-dev-documentation/

Here below is my block out of the area, representing the main points of interest. These are preliminary and will be subject to minor changes during development:

Image 1 - Level Design Block Out

Image 2 - Area 1 populated by forest

Image 3 - Area 2 large square area

Image 4 - Castle Ruins

Luca_Bat

In order to populate the level, I created a list of the main assets that are required. I decided to start from the largest to the smaller, focusing on rocks, vegetation and the carriage hero asset. Here below are some of the primary wall assets I modelled which are going to be used for the castle ruin area:

Here is a procedural material and a seamless texture I created using Blender and Photoshop:

Image 1 - Material Overview

Image 2 - Castle Ruins Wall Texture maps C-AO-N-Dp

Image 3 - Wall with Material Shader 

Image 4 - Wall Reference Image

Luca_Bat

I imported the walls in Unreal Engine and created some of the assets needed for the castle ruins using the modular pieces. I think they look fine, although the real-world ruins are better preserved than my rendition. 

Image 1 - Castle Ruin assets assembled with the modular wall assets

I created also a material for the ground and applied some basic macro variations to avoid seeing the repetition of the seamless texture. I created it by taking photos at my local park and then working on photoshop to create a seamless texture. Other maps were generated with Materialize:

Image 2 - Rootsy Ground Original Material
I added a grass mesh I created previously with the foliage tool and checked the shader complexity. The grass asset is a texture atlas of several grass blades masked with an alpha, and animated with world position offset using the vertex color node to check on grass height:

Image 3 - Wall Assets with Grass and Ground Material


Image 4 - Shader Complexity