Undead Burg - Dark Souls 1 inspired 3D scene [Blender]

in #art5 years ago

7.jpg

It's finally done!

I've been working on this thing for around a month now, constantly changing little details, constantly playing with textures and, overall, trying to improve it as much as I could.

While the scene is not the best thing you'll ever see, and certainly not exactly what I had in mind, it's the maximum I can do at the present moment with my current Blender skills.

So, instead of dragging this project on forever, I decided to just end the work here, and publish it the way it is. I'd rather have one decent project finished than none because of my desire to make everything perfect.

For those of you who played Dark Souls 1, you probably recognize, to some extent, the scene - it's Undead Burg, but made in a different way. Instead of making everything in the same dark and gloomy way, I decided to change things a little and make a part of Undead Burg as being an area where people constantly walk by and work.

I got the idea for this scene after I saw a Facebook competition last month where the prizes were 3 games: Hollow Knight, Hitman and 7 Days to Die. The rules were simple - create a scene from a game you like, however you like (pictures, drawings, 3d modelling, etc).

Since not long before that I finished Dark Souls 1, I decided to do something related to that game, especially since I really enjoyed it.

I started working on the scene that day, and in around 4 hours I managed to make all this:

1.png

Honestly, that was the easy part. The hardest thing was building everything at an angle. It was kinda hard to figure out how to move some objects around the scene, but nothing was too complicated.

Then, I had to start texturing everything, and here's where things got a little hard. I'm not that good at texturing. I'm still learning, and this was the first scene I worked on so determined to make everything look really good, so while I wasn't sure about my skills, I gave it a try.

And the results weren't that... good:

2.png

The textures on the boxes were okay, but anything else was horrible. However, this wasn't the final thing. I used those textures just to get an idea of how everything will look like with textures.

Then I kept working and I managed to come up with this:

3.png

At this point, I had several problems, but the main one was the house on the left. The textures on it were just horrible. So, I started playing with them, and in the end, I managed to come up with a better result that ended up being what I used for the competition:

4.jpg

It was still pretty bad, but it was better than before.

After I was done with all that, and after I didn't win the competition, I decided that I could do better, so I started playing with the scene.

First and foremost, I started playing with the textures. I had to change a lot of things. I had to learn more about Normal Maps, Bump Maps, Reflection Maps and Displacement Maps. It was a nightmare, until I started understanding things better.

Finding good textures wasn't easy either. I managed to use some really good ones for free from Poliigon and Texture Haven, but the rest of them, I just had to get from all kind of websites, and then try to create normal maps and height maps for them using Photoshop.

It was annoying, but it worked, more or less.

Then, it was time for me to change some things. Details was the first thing I had in mind - my scene was pretty empty, and it was fairly hard for anyone (including people who played the game) to tell that the scene was from Dark Souls, unless they paid attention to the game's architecture.

So, I deleted the sword and I made a better one. Then I added some bottles, some books, some more swords and a shield. I changed the interiors so they looked a lot more "human", and then I changed the way the bridge looked, adding some planks and better rocks.

All that was great, but it was time for me to apply what I learned about textures and remake most of the things I already made before. I started with the walls, and I added moss to them. It was fairly tricky, but using a certain node system I managed to do it.

Here it is:

Untitled.png

Looks kinda complicated at first, but it's all just a combination of two textures, with some noise added to the moss texture so it makes it look more realistic, and then different details.

I used the same node system on other textures, removed it from others, and finally, I used some Displacement Maps to increase the realism on the textures applied to the bridge and houses.

And that's how I got to the final version:

5.jpg

I have to say, I enjoyed the project a lot, but it was annoying at times.

I didn't have a lot of experience, I didn't know how to work efficiently and because of that everything was a lot harder than it had to be. But, with some help and persistence, I managed to finish it.

Then I used different HDRI images to change the lighting, and rendered everything from different angles:

6.png

7.jpg

8.jpg

9.png

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If there's anything I got out of this, besides a finished project, was a lot, and I mean A LOT of experience.

I learned more about textures in this single project than I learned from all the tutorials I watched.

Another thing I learned was that no matter how much you try, you can't always get the exact thing you have in mind, which is usually perfection, not unless you have a lot of skill.

Sometimes, ending a project and publishing it is a lot better than working on it for years just to make everything perfect.

Also, as I said, I had a lot of help, mainly from Diana Kovacs (https://www.artstation.com/kovacs_diana) who helped me A LOT with the composition, and indirectly, from Andrew Price, the person who, with his tutorials, helped me get started with Blender. His free textures from Poliigon also improved the scene by A LOT.

I am kinda sad I couldn't work a little more on this though, mainly because my computer couldn't keep up with all those textures and polygons any more. Every time I pressed Render, my video card was almost running out of memory, making me reduce the quality of some textures and desperately trying to reduce the polygon count.

All in all, I'm glad I'm finally done with this little project and I can now move on to another one. I hope you enjoyed this short article :)

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Very cool content you've build there. Respect! You have my follow!

Short question: I am a hobby game dev and never modeled anything... I am just writing code :D
How much effort do you think is it to get into blender and have something somewhat usefull? Would be great for me to be able to create stuff for prototypes on my own.

Hello, thank you for the follow!

Blender is a lot easier than you think, people make 3D modelling seem like it's something hard to do, but it's not at all if you learn from the right place.

To get started, I followed these tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjEaoINr3zgHs8uzT3yqe4iHGfkCmMJ0P&disable_polymer=true

The entire playlist is around 5 hours long, and you'll learn pretty much everything you need to start building things on your own.

The interface is gonna be scary at first, maybe, but once you learn what everything does, you'll see how intuitive it is. Plus, somewhere next year a new release for Blender will appear, Blender 2.80, that will have a much nicer interface, so it's gonna be even easier for beginners to get into 3D modelling using Blender.

If you're interested, watch the tutorials in the playlist I gave you, then, once you're done, on the same channel (Blender Guru) watch the Anvil tutorials and try to make an anvil yourself. That's gonna teach you more advanced stuff, like good texturing and modelling.

Once you're done with all those tutorials you should be able to build a bunch of things alone.

I actually did it! Thanks for pointing out his channel! Made the first step easy and satisfying :D
untitled.png

That awesome, good job! Hope you liked Blender :)

Thank you for the comprehensive answer :)
I will definitely take a look at it.

I would like to congratulate you again man, your great effort is paying off, I can't stop looking at this amazingly beautifull piece you have created, it really takes me back, congratulations!


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I really appreciate the kind words, I used to think the scene wasn't as good, but the feedback motivates me to keep working on other scenes, so thank you.

Also, thank you for nominating me to @curie , I really appreciate the support! :)

What a great scene! It really looks like it's part of a game. You did a great job rendering all the assets here :D.
                     
Congratulations for the curie vote :).

Thank you! :)

Praise Andrew Price

You've done an excellent job on this scene. Although I haven't got my hands on texturing using image texture (I'm currently enjoying hand painted texture), I can see how much experience one can get from making this in a month... A LOT.
Did you play the game and took screenshots from different angles for the reference to create the whole environment?

Do you participate in Weekly CG Challenge as well?

Thank you!

At some point, I'll want to get into painted textures as well since using image textures can be really hard, especially when you don't have normal textures made by someone good. The ones generated by Photoshop, Materialize or other software aren't that good.

Sadly I'm still really new to this, and I'm probably gonna need a tablet if I want to create my own textures, but I have to consider that option since it's a lot easier to make the texture the way you want and make amazing normals than to find exactly the textures you need online. Most of the time you have to settle for what you find, even though it may not be exactly what you want.

Related to the game, I used mainly one picture as a reference, and whenever I needed a better angle, to understand how everything needs to be built, I just hopped into the game, killed everything around me and looked at how some things were built.

I didn't do that a lot tough, mainly because while I wanted the scene to be similar to the one in Dark Souls, I also wanted to make it a little different, not too much, but enough for it to not look exactly like the one in the game (that's why behind the left house there's nothing, despite there being another house in the game for example.

And no, I did not participate in the Weekly CG Challenge yet, maybe I'll try, not sure my work is good enough tough :)

I'd imagine hopping into the game and having to kill the mobs again and again to be quite problematic XD

Sadly I'm still really new to this
Well for someone who's "really new", this is really great, imo. This scene looked like something that could be featured on blenderartists.org gallery.


I'm new to Blender as well, and although I do enjoy hand painting, I'd be lying if I say it's not hard to paint without pen tablet. And I haven't reached the point of working with normal maps too. Still, it's a fun process of 3D modelling nonetheless.

Well, not really, I got the Zweihander in under a minute, and mobs were dying in one hit, so it wasn't a big problem. That's one of the reasons I included it in the scene, because it's such an iconic sword in the Dark Souls games, always a good choice in terms of weapons :)

Also, thank you for the kind words :)

Modelling is indeed fun, I like it a lot more than texturing, something a lot of people may relate to, but sadly, texturing is fairly essential in a lot of situations, so you can't really skip it no matter how much you'd like to.

Also, I can imagine how hard painting is without a tablet and a pen. It's hard with those things anyway. The advantage is that if you invest the time and you learn how to paint amazing textures, your scenes will look better than most scenes people make. Good textures make such a difference, and it's extremely hard to find good image textures online, especially free.

I don't know Undead Burg as I don't know the game. BUT it looks like you put a lot of effort and time in creating this. I like that you decided to work further on the project after you didn't win the competition and you aimed for perfection. I think this is the most important. We should aim for the best we can. It doesn't matter if we can't achieve it but at least we tried.

I like your view on this project. You chose a point when you decided it was finished. Even though you could have done something more with it. You also say that you gained a lot of experience so this makes the whole project worth the time that you invested in it.

I personally really like the finished product. The detail is great and the textures are deep and makes me almost believe that it is a real castle. The moss growing on the wall is perfect! You did a great job!

Thank you for sharing and good luck with your next project :)

Thank you very much for your kind words :)

By Lord Gwyn!!! Man, you reproduced a masterpiece! I spend so much time in this game (and that stage, fuck you Taurus demon ) that I recognized immediately, by you just made it another thing, the lighting and the textures are simply beautiful, some other guy may thing is another video game entirely, this is Shinny Souls lol, I would love a mod with this new face, thanks for sharing this, man!

Thank you for the kind words! :)

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Well done @raikuhen!
You have done an excellent job.

Thank you! :)

That is really beautiful work, I like your 3d scene, the cobble stones and a castle with its heavy walls and that boxes. I love old time towns made of wooden buildings and of course either sandstone with cobble stone path or pier or old type haven with its busy live. You had done so hard, detailed work, thought how to make the scene interesting. Looking at it, it seems like there will be people coming around the corner any time.

Thank you, glad you like it! :)

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