Fortress Walls

In this post, you’ll see the work I did for the fortress walls. Initially, we planned to create three variations, but we ultimately developed a single modular kit for all the massive fortress walls. These walls were used extensively throughout the game whenever large, unclimbable surfaces were needed—like on a tenshu (castle tower).

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The project presented two major challenges:
Artisically, how to create visually appealing walls that still feel relatively flat while maintaining their iconic presence.
Production wise, how to dress up countless wall setups using minimal data.

Hugo Lamarre was the 3d artist on this kit, doing an incredible job, kitbashing the wall chunks and arranging all the groups. He build up a crazy 3D Scene were everything was spawned following paths and perfectly snapped. As always, the final in-game result was a huge team effort.

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In term of 3d assets I built a simple recipe of 3 different wall chunks all tiling with each other and the top cap, few tilables for the collapsed parts and fillers as well as around 40 baked stones to give more versatility and build the stairs. Everything was sculpted by hand and build up in ZBrush. For the sculpt I stopped at the major shapes, it was not worth it baking surface noise. Adding it in Painter was more efficient in term of control and iteration and when needed I added detail maps in engine.

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On the material level, to avoid exploding our memory budgets we created a custom shader. We prototyped the layering in painter with only masks using those assets, then Louis Lemieux one of our technical director, created the final shader in Anvil. A bit like a cliff shader but with more artistic inputs like ID maps, Dirt mask etc... The result was a very versatile setup that was allowing us to build a wide range of setup with few assets, letting us focus on quality.

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Once the chunks were sculpted and baked, Hugo the 3d Artist in charge of the kit kitbash randomly every elements to create the gigantic walls. And then we did a huge painting pass to ground, add variety and weathering to all the sub-groups.

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This was an incredible project to work on, and I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity. I've always wanted to create authentic Japanese fortress walls, and seeing them in real life only added to the pressure—but also to the inspiration.
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Art Direction, Thierry Dansereau
Lead Architecture, Dominic Gladu-Despatis
Lead Texture, Dimitri Alexis
Lead Props, Antoine Barbot