Unreal Engine 5 - Hillside Ruins

Hillside Ruins

This project was a long time in the making. The original project idea was to have a castle or monastery type structure in ruins on the top of a hill. The project evolved over time to what you see here.

This was an extremely challenging project as I was utilizing new work flows in my pipeline.

I went for a displaced and decimated environment, which including topology fixing by hand and retopology work for other areas of the project.

I use several shaders to control the colours of the foliage, rocks, tiles via RGB masks as well as swaying on the Tree Leaves and Trunks.

I wanted a very vibrant, autumn season environment with custom lighting which highlighted the focal area of the keep entrance itself.

Replacing volumetric clouds, I painted a cloud sheet for some planes which I scatteded in the background and around the distance mountains and some foreground areas allowing for depth fade to be used in those areas.

I utilized Zbrush and Substance 3D Designer a lot in the environment, I wanted the textures to contrast the foliage in how it was stylized.

The main textures on the structure, tree bark, dirt road are all detailed where as the foliage uses a mix of gradients and vectors for colour control. The foliage being more soft when compared to the main structured objects which are detailed.

Sculpting was handled in Zbrush and some textures are created on high res tile sculpt bakes.

For the Rocks, trees and such - I used Runtime Virtual Texturing to help blend the meshes a bit with the ground.