City Above The Clouds

I am excited to showcase my largest project yet, City Above The Clouds!
A mix between Asian and European architecture, a distant city uncorrupted from the struggles of war and conflict. A paradise that can only exist above the clouds.
Everything in the environment was made by me, including the characters, foliage, and clouds. This project presented me with a long list of new and technical challenges such as learning to create a VDB cloud shader and characters within Marvelous Designer. But by far the most challenging and rewarding aspect of the project was learning Unreal PCG to create procedural tools that would allow me to quickly generate the castle's structures and towers. With those tools a castle that would have taken me days to build took me minutes to create.
Making such a large environment also opened my eyes to new ways of adding details and improving the composition of the scene. I realized early on that hand painting materials layers on such a large surface was going to be incredibly time consuming so I added different masks and variation noises that would procedurally generate material layering that was realistic and visually interesting. I also noticed that my castles lacked a lot of Ambient occlusions and realistic built up, So i used distance fields to simulate AO. I am excited to apply these new techniques and tools into my future projects!
Project was based on this incredible concept art by Ting Yue

Concept art:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/JvJBNA

Thank you so much!