Castle Approach

My environment art for a 4 week school assignment. I wanted to go outside my comfort zone to try on a large scale outdoors environment, and came up with the concept of a castle in the process of being raided by a hostile army - of course predominantly inspired by Dark Souls/Elden Ring.
This started off as a very barebones concept sketch that evolved as progress was made, as I figured out more and more where I wanted to take the end result. My main thought process was to build an environment using as relatively few amounts of assets as possible.
I created every castle asset and texture, including the bridge, wooden barrels, scaffoldings, and catapults.
Due to the short time constraint I used Megascans for cliffs and various assets, and various Marketplace assets for the foliage and soldiers.
Originally I only intended for the main static camera, however I was progressing so quickly early on that I decided to spend some time on the environment outside the camera boundaries, to allow for more dynamic camera shots in the end.
During the process I learned a lot about vertex painting textures to eliminate repetition, among other techniques that would help the process along efficientl - though looking back at the result I clearly see areas and assets that lack some polish I wish I had time to touch up on, regardless I'm very happy of the end result and honestly consider this my masterpiece, by my previous standards!