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Leo Torres continues remaking cities from TES V: Skyrim with "sixteen times the detail".
As some of you know, the reason why the cities and towns in Bethesda's most recent The Elder Scrolls games (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim) usually have 5-10 houses and less than 100 inhabitants and look smaller than real-life villages is because they are deliberately scaled-down and don't accurately represent the size of these settlements in the lore.
In recent months, Freelance 3D Artist Leo Torres has been rectifying this by reimagining the main cities of Skyrim, depicting them in a lore-accurate manner and illustrating how they could look in a real-life setting. This time, the creator tackled the capital of Skyrim, Solitude, presenting a larger version of the city with "sixteen times the detail".
According to the artist, the project's aim was to create a more realistic portrayal of the capital city while staying faithful to the overall mood and atmosphere of the original Solitude.
To set up the scene, the artist leveraged a blend of third-party models and custom assets, modeled in Blender and textured in Quixel Mixer. The scene was then rendered using Unreal Engine 5.3.1 on a 3060 Ti GPU, with the engine's Nanite and Lumen tools having been used for all the models and foliage and global illumination and reflections, respectively.
"These are ending up more and more like tourism videos for the Tamriel Tourism Board," commented the creator. "From a playability standpoint, I'm not sure that you'd actually want something this big – it's a lot of work for the artists and you run the risks of making a big, empty world with not much to do. But for lore visualizations like this – not really an issue!"
And here are some WIP shots shared by the author:
Earlier, Leo also showcased The True Scale of Whiterun, a similar recreation of Skyrim's main trading hub:
You can check out more of Leo Torres' incredible works by clicking this link. Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.