Pillars of Nosgoth side project

Hey,everyone! Finally found the time to update this blog :D. This time i started a side project a few months ago. It is a tribute to my all time favorite franchise Legacy of Kain! I have always wanted to do the pillars of Nosgoth. They are so amazing and mysterious! The Pillars are central for the story in all 5 games. You can read more about them here:
http://legacyofkain.wikia.com/wiki/Pillars_of_Nosgoth

And so i started my journey:

First the low poly of the pillar and the base. Of course the platform gave me headaches and had to redo it a couple of times until i get the shape the right way.

All of them together with the color map done. Even the platform looks okay now with the right shape. After i did  the models i turned to Unreal engine 4 and started assembling the scene.

The terrain tool is very handy in the engine. I also did a bit of greyboxing, modeled some walls and archways but there was still something about the entire thing that was bothering me. So i deleted everything and decided to rethink my approach. The skybox is also built from scratch. I used an old tutorial for making skyboxes in UDK. It worked out very good in Unreal Engine 4 :D.

And so i left the rest of the scene for better times and concentrated on the pillars themselves!

The fun part began! Texturing! Love texturing! In Unreal i imported only one pillar but with three material IDs. I populated the other 8 in the scene itself. Pillars and base platform are separate meshes. Did this because in the engine is more comfortable to assemble things ^^. 

For the pillars i had nine textures for each pillar symbol, one parent material and eight instances of this material changing only the part with the symbol inside. As for the platform i thought it was going to be the tricky part,but luckily Quixel+nDO did the magic for me ( I know lots of people recently preffer substance painter/designer. They are great apps and i want to learn them some day too xD, but nDO is a great tool!). 

I already had the color map of the platform, brought in the reference image  and started tracing the symbols with pen tool. After that i colored the respective parts with yellow and grey color and got the color map of the base (see the screenshot from Marmoset). In the end nDO came in and with one click did the normal map after selecting symbols. I also added an ambient occlusion map for more details. The last touches were done in DDO.

When all the textures were ready i imported everything into Unreal Engine,created the material and assigned it to the platform mesh.

This is how they look like in the engine. The guy there is for scale reference :D. Now i need to find more references for the terrain and add details like trees,statues, etc to form a good looking scene in Unreal :P.

I will make sure to post more progress in the future! :) Thank you for reading this long post! :D