Slave Knight Gael

You and Gael, two of the last beings left alive at the end of time, fight to the death in the ruins of the old world. Gael, someone who helped you on your journey, has journeyed and fought endlessly until the end of the world to find and consume the Dark Soul, but knowing that he was incapable of holding onto it, he left a path for you to follow and to defeat him, so that you could bring the Dark Soul to someone who could use it to create a new world.
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Slave Knight Gael is a character that left a huge impact on me when I first played through Dark Souls 3, and back in 2024, I teamed up with Jean to put together a piece of fan art to hopefully share some of the passion that we have for the character and his story to others. Along the journey, we wanted to go further than our Disco Elysium project, and we found some great people to join our little team to achieve our goal.
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Big thanks to Jean, Sheppy, Tammy, Antonio, and Archie who were all active in helping put this project together. Everyone was so generous with their time and skills, and I couldn't have asked for a better group of people to work on this project with. Please check out their socials here and see the rest of their great work -
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Jean Zoudi - Character Art
https://www.artstation.com/jzoudi
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Sophie Shepherd - Character Animation
https://x.com/smshepherd23
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Tammy Kim - Character Rigging / Tech Art
www.linkedin.com/in/tkimtart/
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Antonio Gil Herrera - Character VFX

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Archie Andrews - Dev Ops
https://archieandrews.games/
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My role was to direct the project, build the environment, cinematic and lighting, with an aim to try and give the original DS3 an almost 'Bluepoint' style remaster. We definitely push the tone in a slightly different direction, the original is more monotone and bleak, but instead of a direct copy, we aimed to blend the original with our own styles to create something that we resonated with, and hopefully others will as well.
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As per usual, we made most of this from scratch and by hand without any AI tools, bar a few megascan materials and Unreal asset packs to fill in the gaps of our skillsets and time restrictions. I used a few tools from the Dark Souls modding scene, such as Smithbox, Yabber, DS3Explore, Noesis, FLVER Editor, and DSMapStudio to extract blockout meshes so we could try to keep the environment and Gaels proportions as accurate as possible to the game. The only assets directly used from DS3 in the final scene are the Skyboxes, and some of the vista meshes and billboards, which I decided to use since they have such a huge impact on the vibe of the environment, and to save a bit of time on guess work. Thanks a lot to Lou and Alex who helped provide notes, feedback, and troubleshooting along the way, but especially to the DS3 team and FromSoftware for inspiring this piece.