Behind the Scenes: Nightfall Castle

INTRODUCTION

Hello everyone! I’m Galazi, a self-taught artist from Taiwan.

My first area of study was film editing, and then I began delving into 3D.

I started learning 3D from CG Fast Track, and it has been almost three years now.

Currently, I’m focused on creating environment art.

INSPIRATION

Before I started creating this scene, I made an asset pack first.

If you’d like to, you can get this asset pack on my gumroad.

When I started creating this, my initial idea was to try making a castle set in the mountains.

However, I didn’t have a clear direction for the actual creation, so I found this as a reference for my scene:

PROCESS

I used Blender to complete this scene, exported the video, and then made adjustments in After Effects.

Assets

The castle, mountains, and trees in this project were all modeled from scratch, while the materials and some foreground rock models were sourced from Poly Haven.

Mountain

I sculpted some shapes of the mountain.

Tree on the Mountain

As for the trees, I used geometry nodes to distribute them across the mountains.

The nodes:

The trees in this scene were set up as 2D planes to reduce rendering time.

Lighting

I used warm orange lighting on the buildings.

Light Color: FFD596 

As for the blue lighting, I used it on the small village in the foreground.

Light Color: 6FBFFF

And always remember to add fog!

If you want to see a more detailed production process, I have recorded a timelapse.

Time-lapse

RENDER: Nightfall Castle

Thank you for reading! I hope this can give you a bit of inspiration!

About the Artist                       

Galazi is a freelance 3D artist, currently focusing on environmental art.