So above is the scene I want to make. In terms of the modelling i'm either gonna make the fortress out of modular assets (archways, walls, pillars etc) and once its finishedim gonna combine everything and add a bend modifier to put it into place. The rocks obviously will also be modular assets as will the rubble and broken wall to the left on the image. Foliage and tree will be made later
I have a base mesh of a character that I will use to measure the scale of the scene. At its highest the scene is about 3 pillar measures high and 1 and a quarter at its lowest. The BG bridge in the image below won't need any real texture attention.
Sculpting
This is where the biggest challenges will be. the destruction on the top of the fortress will need a lot of attention and will need the most care in regards to re-topping later on. You can see below what I mean and if any of you guys have any tips on how to make this stage as painless as possible i would be eternally grateful :P
Texturing
This is where I'm going to start to teach myself substance designer as its only really the brick and ground that need serious texture detail. The brick wall on the right here has some bricks sticking out which I've not done before, I've seen some tutorials on how to create this look in substance so ill try them otherwise it will be done in z brush with some final tweaks in substance.
This image is what made me think I could maybe get away with creating some modular assets. If you look just above the archway to the right there is a texture seam which makes me think the devs have done different LOD passes on the same asset and the combined them all at the end.
Engine
This will be done in unreal. I have the most experience with this and should hopefully have no problems getting everything in. Lighting will need some experimenting but shouldn't be too much trouble hopefully
So that is my rough road map, no doubt I've completely bitten off more than I can chew but I think this project will help me get the next level so any feedback or tips you guys could give would be very awesome
Replies
So this is what I've got so far. Haven't had a lot of time so progress will be slow but so far I think I've got a good block out
Used the scale figure I got with Thiago klafke's unreal environment tutorial
This is the first section using the guy for scale and I created a rough brick texture in substance designer that i will use as my base for the lowest sections. might go back in and crate the moss later but for now the photo will do
And the substance
I've got the arena laid out but i'm now stuck on how to proceed with the upper tiers. My guess is to take them into zbrush and make the sillouette of the destruction then fill it out with small meshes of bricks. If you guys have any tips or advice i would be grateful.
The section highlighted in purple below shows what i mean
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/MultiTexture#Modulation_Blending
This blending workflow likely extends to most of the wall and arch assets in the scene.
The upper destroyed walls are probably made with another tiling map for smaller bricks (seen immediately right of your purple color), a few unique brick models that might be packed into one shared atlas, and probably some heavy reuse of the existing lower-wall tiling maps by UVing them onto unique lowpoly meshes (and blending them with vertex color).
Your existing substance stone wall texture looks pretty flat unfortunately. You could spend a bit more time on this to get more uneven stone sizes/heights/rotations, and more variation in grout width/depth.
Good luck with this. It's an excellent project and you'll learn tons!
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/EnvironmentSculpting#Tiled_Bricks
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Modular_environments
Then create your normal that has all the noisy details at a much lower intensity, and blend them together.
If you use a tile generator node to create the brick pattern, you can set random luminance to make some bricks darker than others. This will make them protrude out less in the normal map than others.