Tenebris - Breakdown
For the past 4 months during my time at The Game Assemly I have been working on a true-to-scale mid-poly recreation of the Cologne Cathedral, my emphasis in this project was on modulairity, architectural modelling and technical environment art solutions. I'm very pleased to say that the cathedral is near true to scale and proportion (roughly 10 meters margin of error at most) and could fit a hypothetical full modular interior kit aswell. My main challenge for this project was breaking up textures at such a large scale, especially given that fact that I decided to work with 2K textures at a 1024 texel density. This effectively meant that I would get dozens of repeats of my textures across the many large surfaces and so I put a lot of effort into my shader to allow macro variation and manual control with vertex paint. It was also an interesting experience working on a real life reference that I had limited access to which effectively meant that I had to treasure hunt for many good angles and historical blueprints. Overall I learned a lot about the creation of trimsheets, the utilization of additional UV sets for masks, various kinds of decals and many other techniques to aid my skills as an artist. All assets were created by me from scratch except the landscape material which I used from Quixel Megascans and the lion head of the bronze doors made by my classmate Isak Zillén. I also used the ultra dynamic sky and screen space volumetric scattering addons.
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If you would like to see the breakdowns of this project please make sure to check out my second post! https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qJx9eL
Modules associated with the front facade / towers, these are relatively custom compared to the rest of the kit.
All modules excluding the main facade pieces, the transept tower is based on the original pre WW2 design.
Showcase of the texturing approach I had for the modular pieces.
The primary challenge with this project was breaking up tiling as I had a 1024px/m TD and 2M textures, I therefore had to utilize vertex paint and world aligned masks to sell the look. I decided against baked RGB masks on the modules due to their scale.
Special thanks to my Technical Artist friend Elias Bennaceur who helped me with how to approach the randomizing setup.
Bronze door made using a hybrid trim sheet and RGB masks using a secondary UV.
Showcase of some material variations that are used / possible with my Substance Designer setup.
I knew I was going to need many variations of the base material, therefore I created a very modular setup to toggle different details almost like layers in softwares like photoshop. I also referenced indexed / photoscanned albedo values for the basecolor.
8 Variants of leaks made with the same material setup in Substance Designer, after making the base variant I made the others by randomizing some noises.
Showcase of radial modularity used to create the backside of the cathedral.
These pieces were quickly put together to anchor the building to the environment and to contextualize the scale. I also reused elements from the cathedral to create details for these.
Progress of the cathedral blockout, I referenced the floorplan of the building to get accurate metrics. Note that these are only the major blockout stages and were used to inform scale and proportions.
Collection of references to reconstruct the cathedral, I also used google maps and earth for closeups and certain angles.