[Environment] Hornwall Castle

Hi Unity people, it's environment time !

I recently came across a beautiful concept art made by Santa Norvaisaite (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xz9m0X) and felt in love with the atmosphere. I usualy base my environments on several reference / insipirations, but this time I really wanted to reproduce and keep the exact same feeling of this concept art only. I asked her the permission and here is the result a little time later.

Beforehand notes :
- Screenshots have a 3000 pixels width if you click on them
- It's in Unity 2019 LWRP
- I used a lot of Megascan props to populate the terrain
- Specific items such as the Castle/sky/water/paticles has been made from scratch

First shot is based on the exact same point of view :



And then I wasn't sure I would do it at first.. but I gave a go to a FPS view closer to the castle, with a more detailed scene :



If you want to fully permeate the place, here is a video with the landscape animated things / some sound / small camera movement :

If you have some points that look shady to you or not well explained or simply suggestions , please say things here in this thread I will give answers

Intereactive BREAKDOWN here : https://novashade.itch.io/hownwall-castle-breakdown

If you want to stay connected :
Twitter https://twitter.com/CorentinClays
Asset Store https://assetstore.unity.com/publishers/17229
ArtStation https://www.artstation.com/corentinclays

 

This is awesome!

Would you mind sharing the details of tech (postprocess, light and so on) you are using ?

 

Looks amazing! Would love to see more of a breakdown/process.

 

@koirat @MxHarr
I just did some kind of interactive breakdown , it loads automatically in your browser : https://novashade.itch.io/hownwall-castle-breakdown
Concerning all the others informations here is it :

Softwares
It's Unity 2019 LWRP (Started with HDRP and realised the bloom was F***ed up and many post process things not functional at the moment)
I used Shader Graph for custom shaders BUT should have used VFX graph.

Lighting
More basic that you would imagine. I didn't felt the need to have GI so it's basically a single directional light with soft shadows lol, with some basic ambient light. the only thing worth mentionning is the fact that the front face of the castle is not lit by the sun (it's at 90° degrees from it) So i cheated with a custom shader on the castle that give a light boost based on the axis of the front face. There is also an ambient occlusion baked on UV2 for the castle.

Post process
Quite basic too : A red Bloom with custom lens dirt for the first screen, Tonemapping / Color grading , Grain and Chromatic aberation.
You could think there is some kind of volumetric fog but there is not. This is the classic linear fog and at the front this is some smoke particles on the ground that blends softly.

Assets
All the props to populate the terrain are photogrametric models that comes from Megascan. I would not have the time to properly model nor achieve such realistic level by myself so easily. Since it was a scene composition exercice this was not the goal.
The things I made 100%from scratch are:
- The castle (In blender)
- The water with its custom shader
- The skydome and the sun are hand made too (The sun has been separate on a plane with a shader that blends it)
- Also, huge cheers for the crows assets : https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/characters/animals/bird-flock-crow-4022

 

You've done an excellent job of retaining the concept's feel. Well done!

 

The project has been featured in an article from 80.level, lot of more informations right there : https://80.lv/articles/hornwall-castle-working-on-environment-shaders-and-ambiance/

 

Looks very nice, especially since it is LWRP.
I would replace the hopeful morning bird chirp with the cawing of crows to match the dark mood.