Azuchi Castle Materials

In this gallery, you will find the work I created for Azuchi Castle, with a particular focus on the Tenshu.
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Azuchi Castle was a marvelous architectural masterpiece, built by Oda Nobunaga, one of Japan’s three great unifiers. Given its historical significance, we represented it as a landmark in our game.

I was fortunate to visit the Azuchi Museum in Shiga Prefecture, which provided invaluable insight into the castle’s unique, ornate, and richly detailed design.
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I divided my workload between floors, wall structures, paintings, and props such as doors and bells. I chose a thicker paint than usual to give the structure a fresh look and make it stand out more in our world.

I’ve always loved researching religious and architectural lore to create meaningful decorative elements, including the upper trims, panels, and paintings inspired by buddhism. All paintings were hand-drawn and then layered onto a gold-leafed material I created specifically for this purpose.

Some paintings, like the Hell painting, were fully illustrated, while others, such as the ceiling adorned with sacred objects and Hiten, were alpha decals. These decals were then carefully arranged in 3D to form the final ceiling composition. This approach allowed me to maintain a high pixel ratio without requiring massive textures.
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The doors were also a very interesting mandate. I saw those marvelous floral designs in the museum and some similar ones on Chikubu-Shima at a temple entrance. I took inspiration from both to create our version, ensuring it felt grounded in Japanese culture without directly copying a design. I created the ornaments in 3D, arranged them in ZBrush, then did a ZGrab before refining everything in Designer. There, I layered materials to create the final tilables. I used the same process to create the interior ceiling.
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As usual, this work is a huge team work and I'm thankful for everyone involved in the process.
The Buddha painitng as well as the garden diner on the second floors were made by Caroline Soucy.
Art Direction, Thierry Dansereau
Lead Architecture, Dominic Gladu-Despatis
Lead Texture, Dimitri Alexis
Lead Props, Antoine Barbot