WEEK 6 Storytelling Modular piece

For my hero asset, I looked back on Baldur’s gate 3 and other similar games and how they deal with healing stations and save points. As this project has evolved, I’ve come to like the idea that the area of the dungeon crawler I have modelled is a checkpoint area. It has a large and grand atmosphere, perhaps an area that the player comes across during a transition between new stages, or part of a home town away from the mission zones.

Dndspeak. (2022). 100 Magical Fountains and Pools. [Online]. dndspeak. Last Updated: April 1. Available at: https://www.dndspeak.com/2022/04/01/100-magical-fountains-and-pools/ [Accessed 7 May 2025].

I found this cool article which lists a bunch of different uses for fountains within DnD games, which I thought was super cool. Whilst I wasn’t sure about how I could implement any cool effects when approaching the fountain in my scene, I did think it would be cool to drink from a fancy grail, to save the progress in your game. Many games automatically save when going to a new zone, and I thought this was a super unique idea that makes something as trivial as saving the progress in your game something fun!

Here is the base model I created. I have panned UVs in unity in the past so I figured it wouldn’t be able to do the same in unreal.

The main part of this project was the grail, so I decided to do some extra detail in zbrush.

I also added some balls which i would turn into crystals. I decimated them pretty hard, so they looked kind of jaggedy. I made sure each edge on the crystals was a hard edge. because the grail is quite small when actually in engine, this should help create a larger more distinct sparkle effect, instead of just cranking the metallics up and roughness down.

Texturing and baking in substance was more of just the same process.

For the table of the grail, I just did all the texturing in substance painter. I used some of the cool celtic symbol alphas that come with substance to create some fancy cloth patterns. I added additional normal height to all the trimmings on the cloth to help it stand out more. Idea being, if its fancy and detailed, it should attract the players attention as an interactable object