The Gothic Cloister

What up y’all, this piece was originally completed in January of 2025 after studying abroad in Montreal and being inspired by it’s Neo-Gothic architecture, and I recently came back to it to give it a fresh coat of paint. I did this by doing a complete re-lighting of the scene, converting it from static, baked lighting to a dynamic setup using Lumen - using techniques I’d learned in a lighting for games course. Originally, the lighting was very low-contrast and featured universally warm lighting, which made the scene feel a little too flat and uninteresting. I was inspired by a scene in the film, The Green Knight, which features golden warm tones for the light and cool greens for the shadows, which I felt worked great for this scene and makes it feel much more dynamic. I also gave the shield in the foreground an actual fresh coat of red paint to give the scene an actual focal point. Finally, I figured creating a tree would help populate the empty courtyard and skybox and would flex the procedural modeling muscles I’ve gained learning Houdini. The tree was generated using the Labs tree nodes and the branches were sculpted in Zbrush, then baked down onto a plane to be used as foliage cards. This project was originally a great exercise in learning modularity, creating simple foliage, and working in Substance Designer, and now it’s been an exercise in creating atmospheric and tense lighting and composition.

Modular kit modeled in Maya and textured in Substance Designer with a tiling material + an RGB mask in Painter. Other props modeled in Maya + textured in Painter. Foliage modeled in Maya + textured in Designer via a foliage atlas. Tree generated in Houdini + sculpted in Zbrush and textured in Painter.