DESERT FORTRESS

For my third demo reel piece, I decided to deviate from my previous historical works and commit to a vista firmly planted in the fantasy genre. I also chose to work from a piece of concept art to both provide me with direction as well as demonstrate my ability to work along predetermined creative guidelines. The concept I selected was Max Bedulenko’s “Desert Fortress.”

"Desert Fortress." Concept by Max Bedulenko

For texturing the terrains, I turned to Quixel Mixer, using Gaea’s terrain maps to mask the different Megascans materials. The slope and curvature maps proved invaluable here for delineating sand versus hard rock, while downcutting allowed for creating breakup in the sediment. Once I brought all my assets into the Unreal Engine, I created custom shaders with editable parameters so that I could color-correct and adjust certain values such as the roughness and albedo contrasts, along with normal intensity, based on my eventual lighting.

The fortress in the concept art is very geometric, and I found it challenging to add sufficient detail without deviating too far from the concept. In the end, I sculpted multiple layers of damaged brickwork and added some modular scaffolding made from some Megascans wood planks. The fortress was textured in Substance Painter - I created a few different brick materials and used painted masks to isolate them to the desired areas, using natural breakup in the bricks to guide me.

My first step was procedurally generating a number of terrains using the Gaea plugin. Rather than trying to generate the whole environment as one terrain, I broke the terrain into sections based on the foreground, midground, and background. Trying to match each section to the concept art one for one was easier than trying to recreate the whole piece in a single terrain. My plan from the outset was to rely on the sculpted rock features and atmospheric haze to mask the breaks between the terrains.

Once I sculpted the rocks in Zbrush, I imported all my assets into Unreal Engine as nanite meshes and went to work arranging everything. I experimented with a few different lighting setups, from Ultra Dynamic Skies to more traditional Sky Domes. In the end I settled on using an HDRI backdrop along with directional lights to replicate the high contrast dawn/dusk look of the concept art.

William Faucher’s EasyFog plugin really helped to bring this piece to life. The final touch was some minor color correction in Nuke, along with compositing in a VFX element of flying birds so as to inject some life into the otherwise static environment. This piece was a good experiment for showcasing my Unreal abilities!