This is a big project I’ve been working on for a while now. The idea was to create a playable small area of the Stormveil Castle, inside Unreal, in a stylized look and close to isometric view.

I’ll be using Blender for all the modeling and sculpting of the objects, and texturing in Substance Painter.

The initial scope was to create the exit of Stormveil Castle into Liurnia, this part:

So I started modeling some of the pieces and texturing, using post process inside Unreal to get the stylized look and outlines.

I decided to only use the base color for all assets and later added an option to add bump offset with a height map, for the walls and floor.

I’m using the red channel of the vertex color to add variation and paint the occlusion details, and the green channel does the material blending.

Continuing the updates, after looking at that area  noticed that it uses pretty much the same materials and assets, so I decided to extend the scope, starting all the way from the entrance to the throne, up to the exit to Liurnia:

Some screenshots of the new areas:

Entrance to the throne room

Throne room

Middle of the area, this is where you find the Shabriri Grape item.

Exit of the castle into Liurnia.

The throne room has a bunch of different assets/textures, so that will take a while to finish it, also there are several statues, which will be a problem as I don't have experience with it.

Here's a video of the process of updating these areas:

Here is how the materials and post processing work in this project.

As I said before I'm only using base color for the assets, the ground and wall textures are tiling and use a height map for the bump offset to add more depth:

You can see that there is some distortion, but it's not very noticiable, especially from a distance.

I'm also using vertex paint to add variation, the red channel for ambient occlusion and the green one to do material blending:

The material blending also uses the height map so that it looks more natural.

And last with the post processing I add the outlines and can also control the light and shadow color, which really helps bring everything together.

Another update showing how the project is currently looking and how I'm masking the objects in front of the player.

Initially, the walls and floors were only a plane, and the transparency came from backface culling, but I wanted the structure to feel more solid, so I decided to add depth to the walls, floors and ceilings.

Here is a screenshot of the entrance area:

And without hiding the walls/ceilings:

Also put a zoom in and out function:

I wanted to be able to set the transparency of any object and also create a mask around the player for objects in front of the camera:

To avoid using materials with transparency in all my assets I'm using the DitherTemporalIAA node, which actually creates a mask (either complety visible or invisble), but uses a dither pattern to fake transparency.

Here is a video showing the area and the masking effect (sorry for the low quality):

There is a bit of an artefact when you're moving but it's very minor and it's worth it for the optimization.

Small update for the project. I completed the basic layout of the area, from start to finish.

Of course there's still a lot of stuff to add, but at least the basic structure is done, here is a video showing the character going from the entrance to the exit of the area:

Also, some screenshots of the assets being used here, important to know that the texturing is not final yet: