Last year I played through Dark Souls for the first time, and it quickly became one of my favorite games.
I knew I wanted to do a project focused around Dark Souls, and after finishing my Elden Ring project, I felt confident to start looking at what I could work with from the game.
I was inspired by the Demon's Souls remake, and decided to attempt to recreate one of the most memorable places from the game: Blighttown.

I choose the area since it has both hard surface and organic assets, with lots of weathering and material blending.
This was a perfect opportunity to practice my texturing skills, learn complex vertex color blending and practice creating wooden assets.
I decided to limit the scope of the project to the bonfire area, since that part of the area was the most memorable to me.

A big challenge came from trying to figure our what Fromsoftware was imagining when creating the area, and trying to fill in the details according to that.
In the end, the color scheme and athmosphere of my remake changed quite a bit from the original, but I feel like it kept the original vision intact, and modernized it more sucsessfully than not.

I started with taking a bunch of screenshots of the original area for reference. It was important to try to match the placement of map elements and props.

The noclip website was a huge help in making sense of the environment, a huge thanks to the people responsible for it.

I used Bluepoint's Demon's Souls remake as a reference a lot, especially their work on the Valley of Defilement, since that area shares a lot of similarities with Blighttown.

After I gathered enough reference, I blocked out the environment in Blender, and begun working on the assets.

For the kit, I made some general wooden assets like planks and sticks, and then assembled the kit from them.

For the objects, I started with remaking the ones that were present in the original. I tried to stay as close as possible in shape to the original ones.
I then made some modified versions of these objects, and created some of my own from scratch, like the clothes and cobwebs.

The cloth uses the same method I described in my Cathedral of Marika project with the gradient textures to sway gently.

I also remade the item and fire effects, and created some dust and fly particles.

I started with creating the brick texture in Substance Designer.

I created two additional texture sets for the brick material, to use them with vertex color blending.

For the vertex color blending I used Unreal's built in HeightLerp node.

I also added some procedural ambient occlusion to the transition betweem the plaster and the brick to help give the material some more depth.

Additionally, I used the blue channel to blend in a lower roughness value.

I also modelled some bricks using the brick texture, to place along the walls and give them more depth.

I started with experimenting with sculpting the wooden textures, but I didnt end up with pleasing results, so I decided to do it procedurally in Substance Painter.
This method comes with its downsides tho, and the assets dont look amazing from every angle, but for my use case they worked well.

The plank material also makes use of vertex color blending, it blends between a mossy, cobwebby and wet verion.

I put together a small demo scene of all the final assets.

Looking back, I would create some of the assets with higher fidelity, I was too afraid to go beyond a couple thousand tris per asset.

I think I challenged myself with this project, and I learned a lot working on it.

In the end, I made two different versions of the renders, one made to match my vision of the area modernized, and one trying to replicate the original oldschool look.

Remaking an oldschool game is definetly challenging both practically and artistically, and while I would change some things retroscpectively, in the end, I am happy with the project, and I loved working on it.

Thank you for reading, and enjoy the final renders!