The Cliffside Refuge

Howdy yall,
The Cliffside Refuge is my latest environment art project which I worked on over the course of 7 weeks, and served as an exercise in creating a large and contained outdoor game environment. My goals for this project were to learn how to create a large-scale rock kit (to make a cliff+mountain out of), learning a new workflow for texturing these massive rocks, and to establish a moody, ominous, and atmospheric lighting setup. I was initially inspired by Ricardo Lima's piece "The Descent" (pictured in my reference board), but I ended up creating my own composition which took elements from his piece, as well as drawing a lot of influence from the Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde. Going off of my own concept proved to a really tough challenge, as I have very little concepting and design experience and it forced me to learn a lot of how to make a composition balanced, as well as how to successfully lead the eye & the player throughout the scene from multiple angles. I spent a lot of time in this project nailing down the composition.

For the rock kit - I sculpted three unique rocks in Zbrush, reduced & optimized the meshes in Maya, then baked them in Substance Painter. There, I created an RGB mask for edge highlights, cavaties, and surface color variation. In Substance Designer, I created a base tiling rock material + a variation that had orange/yellow lichen growth. Finally, I put it all together in Unreal - where I created a custom shader which combines the tiling material normals with the baked normals, adds in the RGB mask information into the base color + roughness, and allows me to vertex paint the lichen material onto the rocks. I liked this workflow so much I ended up using it for the pillars as well.

Looking back on this project, I wish I had spent more time in the concepting and research phase to nail down the establishing shot's composition ahead of time so that I spent less time changing things on the fly. More research and concepting would've also allowed me to create a more unique design for the pillars and architecture. If I had more time on this project, I'd love to create a lot more props to push the narrative of the scene. I'd love to answer questions like: why is there a traveler camping here? Who is this camper & where's he come from? Where and what is this mountain? Does anything live here? Finally, I'd love to do another lighting pass on the scene. I feel that the lighting right now is very overblown and saturated, and I'd love to dial it back, mess with the colors a bit to give the scene more cooler tones , and overall make things much more nuanced, which I think would push the moody, spooky atmosphere I'm going for.

Overall I'm really proud of this project, and I'm super grateful to Champlain Alums Brennan Howell and CJ Spanier, as well as the goat Keegan Nilsson for their guidance, feedback, and critique on this project - they put me on a great track for success and I couldn't have done this without them. You can find their profiles below.

Thanks for reading!

https://www.artstation.com/keegannilsson
https://www.artstation.com/calebscomix
https://www.artstation.com/bdahowell