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

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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 :)