Old Harry's Rock Castle - Virtual Art Dept Concept

Virtual Art Department personal project to add a basic CG castle design to a real world location for art dept pre-production planning, look-development, virtual location scouting using real-time rendering, previs, and planning a vfx live action shoot around the location's lighting.

I used drone photogrammetry to capture Old Harry Rock in Dorset, UK, took that into Unreal Engine and then blocked out basic shapes for the castle that would work for the small footprint on the top of the cliffs and for shot composition. Everything was kept low res for a real-time workflow.

I then modelled a basic modular castle design, and used Quixel & Fab to kit-bash the bridges, and used the UE Sun and Sky actor to work out real world lighting scenarios that could potentially be captured with a live action shoot.

Finally I created some potential shot/lighting/mood concepts for dawn, midday and sunset, based on the geo-location lighting, using sky matte paintings, SkyLight/HDRI, Directional Light and Easy Fog cards. Again, everything was kept low res for an efficient real-time workflow purely for pre-production look development.

RTX 4090