Castle Of Blood - Vampire Post-Apocalypse #leartesdekogonchallenge
4My entry to the Leartes Studios & Dekogon Studios Realtime Environment Art Challenge - The challenge was to create a post-apocalyptic realistic environment for a real-time game engine.
See the full entry post on Artstation
The theme I came up with was an apocalypse due to the conflict between vampires and humans. What remains in the world after decades of slaughter is isolated groups of humans and Vampires, with the vampires knowing that they need humans to survive. Vampires provide shelter to humans in exchange for "donations" and protection. But is it really that benevolent?
This is the Castle of Blood, the originating location of the early vampires. They emerged from deep in the mountains of Romania, over time they constructed a fortress on that location, conducting rituals and human sacrifice.
To keep with the theme, the archtecture was designed for the needs of the vampires, few windows but access to the sky for the moon at night. A large dome curtain was designed for this.
I created the Geometry in Blender and set up the environment in UE4 with Baked light and Ray Tracing enabled. Texturing was a combination of Original Substance Designer Materials and Painting in Substance Painter. Some assets were used from Quixel Megascans to fill in the environment. but all the architecture and main elements, as well as furniture were created by me for the contest.
As usual, I over-scoped for the project and some of the assets I created aren't visible in the scene presented here, but visible in the WIP shots. I learnt a lot, and look forward to creating more detailed environments in Unreal!