Menadion's Desperation

A continuation of my Lonely Winter project, though this time around I wanted to practice creating ruined assets and focus on interior design. It is loosely inspired by Menadion's Desperation, an abandoned and derelict mage tower from my favorite novel Supreme Magus. Tileable brick textures were sculpted in ZBrush and brought into Substance Designer, the rest were 1:1 in Substance Painter. All models were self modeled/sculpted.

My first step was to redesign the tower; I wanted to make it less uniform and perfect smooth, while keeping the architecture interesting. One of the greatest challenges was simulating the parts of the tower collapse, which was done in Blender. I had a lot of fun making the small props and set dressing the scene because I've always had to visualize scenes from books I've read.

Lighting was quite a challenge, as originally I struggled to find reasonable ways to light the basement while maintaining the story of the tower being deserted/abandoned, but I came up with the idea of knocking a hole in the ceiling to allowing light in. This also proved to be a great move composition-wise, as it allowed me to set up a focal point.