Throne of 1000 Swords Work Log

Well, things don’t always turn out how you plan. This week I wanted to participate in the Chair Challenge in memory of Kelli Paswater.

I wanted to take something out of Game Of Thrones. I started looking around for concept art on the so called throne of 1000 swords and found this amazing piece by Marc Simonetti.

Well I can’t acquire a miniature of this, so I decided to attempt to make my own 3D set in Unreal Engine 4.

Building a Set

I started by pulling in a bunch of prop packs from the game Infinity Blade. First I looked for swords that might work.

Next I grabbed some free assets from Paragon (another game) that I might be able to build a castle scene with. I threw the default chair asset in the center as a reference point.

I felt happy enough with this simple scene below.

The Throne

How would I build the throne? Well, Unreal Engine has a foilage brush meant to paint large amounts of grass and other foilage onto landscape. I thought, why not use this to paint swords onto a scaffold? So I started building out a scaffold.

And here is me testing some sword painting.

This is what it looks like when I’m painting.

And finally, after adding some more scaffolding to make some irregular shapes for swords to fit on, I nearly had a finished throne.

Artsy needed something to sit on, so I crafted this little throne as well as a scale reference for Artsy.

FX

I wanted some fire and ice particles, so I dug through all the existing particle effects I had and found these.

By now I was really feeling pressed for time but I wanted to light things properly. So I added a blue light in top right and orange-ish light bottom left for the two elements. And this was the final scene.

The Talent

The easiest part of this entire experiment. Artsy basically nailed it in the first 3 photos. I did split lighting on her, warm on bottom left, cold on top right to match the fx.

Photoshop

My initial composite before any blending or color adjustments.

And the final image.