Miki Castle map

This was a small task, taking roughly four hours late in production. The asset was used in a cinematic for a quest about Miki Castle, and we needed to upgrade its quality.

The original asset was created by another artist, but since the source file was lost, I had to recreate everything from scratch to make the necessary edits.

Well… when life gives you lemons!

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It was a straightforward process—I hand-drew everything on separate layers in Photoshop, in an 8k resolution to achieve a sharp mix of dry and watery textures.

To replicate natural paper folds, I took a physical sheet of paper, folded it, and observed the marks it left. I then recreated those details in Substance Designer to generate the height and normal maps.

In Designer, I layered some pre-made paper textures from our production, added the drawn map, and applied a weathering pass to blend everything together—ensuring it looked natural without appearing too aged.

Finally, I turned the setup into a generator, allowing us to easily recreate the effect for other maps in this production or potential DLCs, like the ACOD World Map.
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As always, this was a collaborative effort, and I'm grateful for the opportunity.
Art Direction, Thierry Dansereau
Lead Architecture, Dominic Gladu-Despatis
Lead Texture, Dimitri Alexis
Lead Props, Antoine Barbot