Citadel

A corner of a town, inspired by Gustaf Tenggren’s concept art for Pinocchio.

This project was an exploration into trim sheets, tiling textures, and modular assets.

Credits:
The typeface for the signs is “Rundruner” by Kludgewerks licensed under the SIL Open Font License (OFL)

Modular assets - All wood shares the same trim sheet

Still and wireframe - 38,000 Triangles

Albedo layer and detailed lighting

Initial lighting variations

Early in the process, I came across the question of how I would create the roofs of my structures. After experimenting with modelling, sculpting, and hand painting, I landed on using Substance Designer exclusively. This gave me a lot of control over the roofing tiles. I used three techniques to make the tiles look painterly and to break up the tiling:

Using the normal map to inform directional colour variation
Creating a brush-stroke pattern that I tiled to break up the tiling
Using a crystal texture to create gradients that were overlaid for additional variation

During this process, I ran into a problem: Since I already had my meshes for the tree trunks ready, I needed a tree generator that exclusively controlled the distribution of leaf cards. However, most tree generator tools base the distribution of the leaves on the tree’s mesh.
I dealt with this by creating a Geometry Nodes setup that allows you to place vertices that dictate the distribution of leaves. You are also given the following parameters:

Scale of leaf clusters
Collection to instance clusters from
Object to dictate the shape of the clusters’ distribution
Direction that clusters should grow towards
Threshold for how early clusters spawn

Tree Generator Demo