Shadowfang Castle

Shadowfang Castle

Hi, I'm Callum, and I'm submitting my entry and environment, which I have created in my spare time over the past 6-7 weeks. I am an aspiring environmental artist and achieved an MA in Game Art and Design at Hertfordshire in 2021 during COVID-19. Since then, I have been working on my own passion projects and aspire to secure a job that allows me to earn a living creating epic environments for games.

My piece is a semi-realistic/fantasy environment that aims to transport audiences to a smoky medieval castle. All the assets, including my attempt at foliage, were made by me. My main influences for this piece are the excellent manga series Berserk, the TV series Castlevania, and, of course, the Souls games.

The Story

The story revolves around a vampiric lord who still lives in his small, isolated keep. The castle is located in a rocky and remote area of a mystical kingdom. All of his servants are people he has stolen and bewitched, taken from nearby villages and forced to serve him. If a servant is loyal, they are buried respectfully. However, in the nearby town of Pabiton, the townsfolk are fed up and want to put a stop to their people disappearing. They decide to lay siege to the castle, attacking it with whatever arms they can find. The loyal servants put up a makeshift defense, but the tide starts to turn in favor of the attacking militia. This all changes when the Count appears from the mist...

The Piece

To fit the story, I created a sense of abandonment and isolation. With a single imposing structure, damaged but still standing, intruding on the rest of the local landscape, I wanted to imagine a peasant passing it on the nearby road, being lured down the path towards it, and then snapping out of it and sprinting away.

Materials

These are some of the materials I created in Substance Designer for the project. These pieces were rendered in the Unreal Engine. I drew a lot of inspiration from games like Demon's Souls and Assassin's Creed, whose true-to-life textures and materials make the player feel immersed in the game. I discovered that each material carried its own narrative, offering a unique tactile experience for the player. I even watched YouTube videos explaining different types of cracks and how they form. For example, varying the pressure results in distinct crack formations, which also differ depending on the material. I aimed to convey this in every piece of material I created, striving to capture the rough, harsh elements of decay.

The bark pieces below are rendered in Marmoset. I had quite a bit of trouble making them in Substance Designer. I found that creating bark is quite a different process from creating rocks. I noticed that tree bark has a layering effect, much like skin, but also a structurally binding element that the layers sit on top of. I paid careful attention to ensure the bark appeared solid yet individually delicate and unique. Achieving this fine balance made it a lot easier to create realistic-looking trees.

Breakdown of assets

Breakdown of Each Asset

Rocks

The rocks were made in ZBrush, textured in Substance Painter, and designed in Substance Designer. Due to their size, I employed some techniques from God of War, incorporating micro and macro albedo and normal maps blended onto the tangent normal. These were then combined with tangent curvature and ambient occlusion masks. For the larger rocks, I didn't sculpt much micro detail, as I felt such details wouldn't be noticeable given the size of the rocks.

Large Assets

Creating the foliage was a real learning curve for me and probably the biggest challenge I encountered. I had used SpeedTree briefly before, but comparing my previous attempts to examples like Assassin's Creed's foliage really motivated me to improve. This required several attempts and re-dos. I went outside and studied trees similar to the ones I eventually designed, taking reference photos from multiple angles to understand their overall shape and patterns. I paid attention to the shadows they cast and the directions they grew. This really helped me create atmospheric and eerie foliage.

The process of creating the Gothic elements required extensive research. I went out and photographed numerous buildings, focusing on key Gothic motifs. I even purchased architectural books to understand the different elements of Gothic facades. Using these references, I created a hybrid/fantasy version, blending key elements from some existing buildings to form my castle.

Smaller Assets

For the smaller pieces, I made them similarly to the large pieces, but this time using a 0-1 UV layout to prepare them for Substance Painter. Some of the wood sculpture pieces didn't get as much attention as the rocks did, mainly because I haven't created wood pieces as frequently as rock and stone models. This is something I hope to focus on in my next project.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot. On to the next project!