Ancient Tomb Environment

Ancient Tomb (concept from Spellforce 3 created by Raphael Lubke)

This was originally an environment I made for a school project at Futuregames using Unity, but I have re-built it in Unreal Engine 5. The concept art is from Spellforce 3 and was created by Raphael Lubke.

For this environment, my pre-production process included breaking the concept down into colour coded sections to help me judge the best way to separate it into different props. Then I started collecting references. I made a white board with all my references and asset list, including a timeline.

Next, I blocked out the scene with basic versions of the models, paying attention to the emerging silhouettes. This is also the stage at which I made a basic light setup to get a feel for the lighting in engine as early as possible.

I modeled everything from scratch in Maya. I created the trim sheet by modeling a low poly in Maya, sculpting a high poly in ZBrush, and then baking and texturing it in Substance Painter. I did a few things differently from the concept, for example, the concept has characters holding torches which are a big part of the lighting setup, so I replaced them with flaming braziers. I also added some damaged pillars in order to break the repetitive nature of the scene. I added a lot of decals to break up tiling and to bring a more unique feel to certain areas.

I created one trim sheet to cover all the props (apart from the floor tiles and hanging braziers) and made a second version with a colour variation. For the floor tiles, I made a tiling texture in Substance Designer and finalized it in Substance Painter.

I created the VFX using Niagara systems (mist, dust particles, and fire). I made a blueprint for the hanging braziers in which I included the geometry itself, a niagara fire system with smoke and sparks, and a point light which I tweaked to make it flicker. I created the water using the Unreal water plugin.