Hello Everyone ! 
It’s been a while I haven’t posted anything, I started a new job a year ago, and leaves not a lot of spare time. Even though I really like my job, it’s not really about making 3D work, so there’s always this itch to create something that became harder and harder to contain ! So, I originally started this project in march 2022, after playing Octopath Traveler (Square Enix), a video game with a unique visual style, and a location in the game that really inspired this scene. It’s sort of my own interpretation of this peculiar place. (You can find the reference image below)
The name Ancient Kingdom Still Remains is inspired by a song from one of my favorite metal band, Mastodon, whose name is Ancient Kingdom. I thought it really captured the feeling I wanted to achieve in this artwork. The aim was to depict a very old library of an ancient time, that a few hiking people (from our era) manage to find out in its abandoned but somehow preserved state.
Main render, a bit compressed for uploading reasons
Square render
Blocking out the scene was a real challenge because the lighting had to act a specific way, a lot of time went into planning out the scene with very basic shapes. The process of adding details was very fun but also extremely long to produce, I wanted to learn Marvelous Designer to be able to dress the three people of the scene, adding even more time in the creation of this piece as I watched a fair amount of tutorials and timelapses to get familiar with the software.
Here was my reference image, screenshotted from Octopath Traveler
You can access to the Artstation project through this link, if you are interested. It includes renders and Sketchfab visualisation for some models : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/VyxO4P
Clay render, because why not !
The scene has been achieved with the help of Blender 2.93, the wonderful add-on tree generator The Grove, Substance Painter, Marvelous Designer, ZBrush, Gaea (for the background) and Photoshop mostly for texture creation and post-processing the scene. It’s been a fun journey !
I wish you a very good day, have fun, 
Théo
