Cathedral Bell | Unannounced Game | Concept Trailer
This is a concept game trailer for a title I hope to develop in the future.
My original goal was to work on a project to teach myself how to model using Blender. My intention was to model a Cathedral Bell for fun, but I quickly thought it would be exciting to take the project further. I taught myself rigging, animating, and UVing in the program so that I could make game-ready assets.
I then also decided to do explore more aspects of Unreal Engine 5. I created a lot of custom effects and functionality to help sell the vibe of the environment of this game. I rendered the video content using Lumen, and much of the still content using Path Tracing.
I am responsible for all aspects of this trailer aside from the modeling and particle effects of the candles. Those come from this asset pack here:
https://cosmos.leartesstudios.com/environments/ancient-cathedral
The components I did create include the following:
Modeling
Texturing
Rigging
Animating
Lighting
Rendering
Video/Visual Effects
Sound Design
Music (I played the guitar for the intro lol)
And Video Editing
The creature from the video was from an older project of mine, that I reused to avoid making this project take substantially longer. View that artwork here:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/A9PozX
I'm very happy with how this project turned out! I think the combination of all of the pieces resulted in a piece that looks great visually, but also does an excellent job setting up the narrative for this game concept that I've been developing recently (In my humble opinion).
View full trailer on Youtube here:
If you have any comments of feedback on the piece, please feel free to message me!
All of these shots are from a recent game concept trailer that I have been working on. I am responsible for all aspects, excluding the candle assets, which can be found in this bundle here: https://cosmos.leartesstudios.com/environments/ancient-cathedral
The creation of this Cathedral Bell asset was the spark that inspired this whole project. My original goal was to learn Blender. I then went deeper in the program than I even have in Maya by teaching myself to rig and animate it as well.
Here are some solo shots of the bell to show off it's textures and topology. It's a bit higher poly than what I would want for a regular game asset, primarily because I wanted to try to model aspects like the rope, rather than relying purely on textures.
Also as a fun note, the spotlight effect isn't created just by a spotlight, I'm using a decal with a sphere mask as it's alpha, set to Modulate in Unreal Engine to essentially block all visibility on meshes surrounding this asset.
As part of learning Blender, I taught myself how to rig and animate. Animating the rope to move along the contour of the bell wheel was rather difficult, but I ended up finding a solution that worked. I made 9 unique states, and transitioned between them.
For the eclipse, I built the functionality into a radially projected texture. It transitions from its start to end state with 1 slider. I used a 512x1 pixel gradient (at the bottom) to drive the color by plugging the effects alpha into the color's UV.
For all of the adornments on the bell, I used simple Substance Designer node networks to craft my alpha shapes. I then took these shapes, saved them as SBSAR files, and applied them in Substance Painter.
Thanks for viewing!