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tackled the interior, some foliage, landscaping experiments, and some material revisits. i view this project as a holistic practice, so i am avoiding using external materials and models as much as possible.

the castle exterior has not changed, other than minor adjustments to account for the newly added interior sides of each wall piece.

a lot of adjustments were made to the stairs and floors, which are finally high-poly and textured. trim was added, floor pieces were more properly fitted to the stairs, and the amount of railing pieces was reduced and better fitted to the floors.

two-sided walls are used; each variant now has an additional a/b form, with a carrying 2 exterior sides and b carrying 1 interior and 1 exterior. this gives me a lot more flexibility to create in-between entry spaces that may not yet require an interior wall treatment.

railings, stairs, and interior walls all use this one texture set. the pattern is stretched a little to accommodate the shrunken wall size.

dust uses a simple particle system (thanks youtube!), which i’ve been able to replicate in unreal engine using niagara.

i keep rendering in blender to ensure that i spend as little time in unreal as possible (a little heavy on the laptop). i just occasionally save everything in the blender file as a .usd and import the scene into unreal. while everything here is still rendered in blender, know that it is simultaneously being imported to unreal!

i tried to make trees with the normal sapling generator in blender but found that the leaves were really lacking; they pointed in directions that made the leaf texture look unattached to the branches. i moved to mtree after some extensive googling to get these results.

i edited mtree’s default leaf texture image to look more fall-ish with some simple photoshop. the material uses some transparency to get those detailed edges with less vertices.

a little heavy on polygons (each tree is about 300,000), and this is reduced heavily from mtree’s raw output of 1.5 to 2 million. still runs well so far, however.

i sculpted a landscape in blender, but i think this part will be fully redone in unreal. it’s too large for my liking, and i’ve had issues properly exporting everything.

the view so far; the trees will probably be placed differently in unreal, but this works for testing! i’m hoping to next make smaller exterior props, such as shrubs, fences, and gravestones.