Stylized Gothic Temple

This project is a 'reskin' of an older project as an exercise in stylized texturing and lighting. Its not something I've done much of in the past, so when I found the original project files on an old drive it felt like the perfect opportunity.

Original artwork here (there you can find mesh and trim sheet breakdowns):
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3od8ao

Quite low poly by 2026 standards - it was a lot of work to make the modular kit work the first time around so I avoided mesh changes, only adding a couple of extra pieces for the larger stained glass window. I also rearranged the layout a little to break the radial symmetry and improve the composition.

I wanted to fully control the light and color balance of the scene without fighting Unreal, and so most of the indirect light is driven by the emissive channel in the materials - The main directional light (which does very little except for the light cast on the floor) feeds its vector to the materials via parameter collection which is then used by a slope mask material function. This let me fully control how the color and value of shadows but also a way of faking subsurface scattering on cloth and candle wax (simply by increasing the shadow values to make it seem like light is passing through). I could also override the MPC vector with a custom one which allowed for underlighting on the statues and meant I could keep the candle light radius quite small. The same vector is used by the window glass to give variable brightness depending on which side of the environment they're on.

There are two master materials, one for windows and the other for everything else. Most of the color comes from a world-aligned texture, and the edges, variation and AO are driven by a packed mask, which can be further modulated with vertex color painting.
This project really helped me understand blueprints and how they communicate with materials and particle systems. It was also really rewarding to try stylized texturing and (hopefully!) pull it off - its something I definitely want to do more of in future.

Big, big thanks to my friend George who gave me really helpful guidance on color and composition, and even provided paint overs of the original images to get me going in the right direction.
https://www.artstation.com/georgelovesy