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Cathedral prop concepts | Deathbound

Cathedral prop concepts made for Trialforge Studio. In 2023 I joined their incredible team to work as a prop and environment concept artist for Deathbound, a souls-like game released in October 2024. It is a pleasure to share those. ♥

The Cathedral is an important area in the game and we needed its interiors to match its impact in the story. It was an old major government building that serves nowadays as a last stand by one side of the war.

I was responsible for creating concept art for some of its rooms and props, including their set dressing. To speed up our pipeline, the 3D team trained me to transition from drawing concepts of the set dressing to simply placing them directly on the scene using Unreal.

Life Goddess Statue

Line drawing of a woman sitting on the ground. She is a black woman with short 4b hair
Life goddess concept.
Deathbound screenshot showing a sitting statue that is 2-3 times taller than the player character.
A view of the statue ingame.

Cathedral door concepts

8 thumbnail drawings of double doors with arches and geometric patterns
Initial door Thumbnails
3 rough drawings of tall doors
Door roughs — testing scale, styles
4 drawings of doors with materials such as dark wood, black marble and gold accents
Door material notes
3d render of a double door. The frame around it is almost thrice as tall as the door itself. It's a black door decorated with geometric patterns and stripes
First door blockout I made in Blender — we loved those, but they were too detailed and ‘art deco’, so I was directed towards using more brutalism.
Sketching door ideas on top of the rough Blender base I modeled for that area.
More door sketching
Final door lineup. I’m really happy with how they came out and think they look stunning in-game.
Final door. The 3D team did an incredible work reproducing and improving their modularity.

Small Life Goddess statue

Side views of a small wooden statue. It's the Life Goddess — a black pregnant woman with short curly hair
Small goddess statue v1
Final small goddess statue concept.
Small goddess statue ingame (she is very tiny!)

Cathedral bench concepts

We needed church benches for the Cathedral’s halls. These were my first thumbnails.
Funneling designs and ideas for the benches
side views of a church bench with 3 seats. It's made of wood and the seat has a blue cushion.
Final bench concept
Final bench concept with some notes and tweaks.
Faction flags textures.

Cathedral lore murals

The next works are murals that are spread around the Cathedral. These tell the world’s story through two goddesses, Life and Death.
Testing the murals on my Blender base
Large mural cleanup
Large mural cleanup
Paintover test, made to get a feel of the final textures
Large mural texture test — paintover on top of my 3D base
A view of the final Genesis Garden mural.

Main Hall set dressing and murals

Main hall set dressing concept in which I established a rhythm of destruction that would lead the player towards interesting areas.
Early main hall mural exploration
More explorations — we pivoted towards bringing Life Goddess imagery again
Final concept has a pregnant Goddess.
Main hall panel ingame, modeled by Renato Medeiros

Small lore murals

Testing the murals’ scale, composition and style. The room was finished so I could just draw on top of screenshots. I was inspired by Tarcila do Amaral and Matisse.
Small murals’ roughs
Window room murals ingame.
Ingame murals. These smaller murals were modeled by Guil Rocha.

Cathedral elevator concepts

Elevator concept. The Cathedral symbol was created by Luisa Cardoso.
Ingame elevator — and a foreshadowing of the next portfolio post :) Ty!

Software: Blender, Unreal, Photoshop.

Team

This list far from covers all Deathbound contributors, it has only team members I’d contact often when creating those concepts. There are more team members listed in my Artstation Deathbound posts.

Rafael Dantas, our art director.

Natane Souza, a 3D props artist passionate about stylized art.

Bruna Grinkraut, a complete environment artist who was also responsible for set dressing.

Yuri Mota, our materials, tree and textures expert.

Bruno Belício, our VFX wizard.

Gabriel Abner, our 3D lead, who modeled the large architectural and natural items, such as the volcano and isles. He has mentored me a lot on how to prepare concepts for 3D pipelines.

Yago Souza, the concept artist responsible for the final boss arena. He is also specialized in hard-surface and lighting.

Lucas Santiago, our lead character concept artist.

Renato Medeiros and Guilherme Rocha, character artists.

Luisa Cardoso, who’d take care of anything relating to UIs, icons and the game’s visual identity as a whole.

João Paulo, one of our level designers.

Semper, our lead 3D animator and generalist.

Anna Gianelli 🪸, our producer.

Thiago Batista, Narrative Director, and Renato Baroni, our lead writer.

Deathbound – Links

Softwares: Blender, Unreal, Photoshop.

Steam: Deathbound

DLC: Deathbound: Accepted by Death on Steam

Development: Trialforge Studio

Publishing: Tate Multimedia

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