Pulse of the Deep

In the Beginning, There Was a Blockout

Hello! My name is Szymon Wilczynski, and I’m excited to be taking part in the Leartes Veiled Realms Challenge.

THE CONCEPT

As with much of my work, I decided to push myself creatively by coming up with my own unique concept rather than working directly from existing concept art.

Above is my very early blockout. You can already see the focal point taking shape—a tree made out of cables, inspired by one of Adrien Girod’s stunning pieces.

The loose idea for now is that this tree is part of a massive network of cables used to transport a mysterious resource that this civilization harvests to power their city.

The city itself is located deep within a cave. The surrounding rocks contain traces of this resource, giving them a celestial quality with bioluminescent characteristics.

THE ARTSTYLE

Since this is a time-limited challenge, I want to work smart. That means choosing an art style that is visually striking yet efficient to produce.

To that end, I’ve been heavily inspired by the stylized work of Slow Clap Studios (Sifu) and the beautiful minimalist style of Somerville. Both styles rely on strong shapes combined with painterly brushstrokes to create a concept-art-like aesthetic, which I find really compelling.

EARLY ARTSTYLE EXPLORATION

I’ve begun experimenting with a shader I created for a previous project. It uses hand-painted tiling normal maps to drive a brushstroke effect across the mesh. This helps keep the pipeline lightweight and efficient, reducing the need for individual texture maps.

In addition, I plan to use RGB masks on a per-asset basis for adding dirt and other detail. These mask textures will be very low resolution (likely around 512) to help keep performance in check. Here is the shader in action for my previous project with more detailed breakdowns how it works - https://www.artstation.com/artwork/DLYXQO

SIMPLE TRIMSHEET EXPLORATION

I’ve also quickly blocked out a trimsheet, which I’ll likely use for the cable assets and possibly other repeating elements across the scene.