Build Eerie Worlds With This Dark Fantasy Signature Collection

Eerie, Dangerous Worlds

I'm pretty picky when it comes to games and their aesthetics — I either love them completely, or I pass entirely after judging them by their cover. Horror, darkness, and atmosphere are usually present in the games I gravitate toward. The sweet spot for me is a world that invites exploration but still feels eerie and dangerous.

Dark fantasy is a broad spectrum to me. It's about anything that bends reality, just slightly — it doesn't have to be Dark Souls, though that's mainly what inspired this collection. Dark Souls builds a world that makes sense in every corner while working with minimal world-building and aesthetics, raising questions and sparking curiosity. I love the idea of smaller areas, each with its own biome, story, gods, and structures — a world that's as interconnected and as versatile as our own, and yet entirely different.

Building Without a Blueprint

With the Shattered World collection, cohesion wasn't something I planned for. At the core of the series, I wanted to bring together as many different elements as possible — elements that connect in some way without necessarily belonging together. I treated each material as a hero asset for a specific environment someone might want to build, pushing each piece toward its own uniqueness. This allowed me to both satisfy the technical complexity I wanted to reach and to make each material strong enough to stand as the focal point of any scene, regardless of context.

The collection evolved constantly. I only had a handful of pieces I was committed to building no matter what — the rest went through several iterations, and some I dropped entirely in favor of new ideas.

Designing for Usability

The idea here is simple: since every material is meant to act as a hero asset, I know its core identity from the start. If you take a ‘normal’ rock material, for example — you're usually driving its age, surface noise, and maybe a few distinct properties depending on whether it's a cliff or a boulder. But for hero assets, you can get far more specific. The parameters should be as restricted and simple as the material's intended impact. Take the Fluvially Eroded Rock material: I designed this around three stages — dried coastal rock, lagoon, and submerged — and from there I only need to direct how the material physically reacts to the environment pushing it into each stage. For some materials I had more creative freedom, since the dark fantasy theme lends itself well to experimenting with extremes.

Each material is built around one of three core components that shape its parameters:

1. Age — Does this material change distinctly over time as it's exposed to its environment, its story, and the fauna interacting with it?
2. Geology — Can this material naturally be found in very different forms or variations?
3. Uniqueness — Is this material distinctive enough that specific visual features need to be deliberately manipulated or removed?

Creative Choices and Constraints

Being a Signature Collection, creative decisions almost always favored the visuals — even within the limits that come with making materials work out of the box.

Working as a material and shader artist for years showed me how rarely you get to build fully fleshed-out, versatile materials in production. Every project has its own budget, needs, and style, and more constraints besides. It's important to build cleanly and in a way that can be expanded upon if needed. I focus less on adaptability through exposed parameters. For someone who wants to grab a material and learn techniques, or simply plug and play, there's rarely a need to prioritize usability over technical or visual polish. But overall, My experience is usually driven by technical solutions paired with visuals, but with clear instructions.

And so in terms of creative decision-making, this project was something new for me. This collection let me fully unfold — crafting materials that might work better from a distance, rather than being detail monsters. Some materials work in conjunction with others, some stand entirely alone. Some are tiny in scale, others are half-landscapes. That mix of use cases and scales made me rethink my approach several times, often shifting the display dimensions of a material by several meters. Ensuring that materials could traverse from one scale to another — the type of thing you can see with the Sandy Bedrock material, for instance, or the Black Ice material — was genuinely interesting.

The Gem Ore

The Gems Ore material is one of my personal favorites in this collection — simply because I love the complexity of this kind of material. Several layers and volumes of different materials fuse together to make up something completely new. I’ve never previously managed to create a good one. Relying on pure textures and displacement for materials that depend on volumetric properties can be clumsy, or even catastrophic.

Gems have that distinctive appearance because of their crystalline structure and the way they absorb and diffuse light. Using an infinitely thin surface — as you typically do for displaced materials — makes it nearly impossible to rely on volume. So instead, you have to bend other physical properties that can be approximated, like subsurface and transmission, pushing them far enough that the result ends up looking like it possesses volume even though it doesn’t.

With the introduction of OpenPBR for the Substance 3D ecosystem, you can get quite close to a true volume approximation — and ensure consistent behavior across software. I initially built the material with those tools, but since this series still relied on Adobe Standard Materials, I had to rebuild it in a more approximated way. I'm still very happy with how it turned out: very little work inside Designer, just the core elements and structure it needed, and then rendered exactly as I wanted.

Lessons in Stepping Back

The Apothecary Cabinet material was probably the biggest challenge, and the material that taught me the biggest lesson as I worked on this collection. It started as a bookshelf with a book generator, for which I wanted to use SDF functions — just before they were introduced as a dedicated node environment in Designer. So I spent weeks building a full SDF toolset inside the pixel processor before placing a single node in the material’s node graph. Then I decided I also wanted to organize the books automatically on the shelf, which meant writing a physics-based stacking algorithm so each instance would lean against the previous book without overlapping. That in turn meant the shelf itself needed to be modular, adapting to the number of books and allowing for empty spaces or drawers.

By the time I had all the pieces together, I was weeks deep into pure mathematics and complex simulations — for a material that certainly wouldn’t look good enough to justify the sheer complexity behind the scenes. Relying on having everything procedurally generated might prove you’re well-versed in the software, but it definitely isn’t the best option if you aim for visual output. Moreover, the material no longer inspired me at all. So I dropped everything and went back to basics: a piece of furniture made out of wood.

Everyone knows impostor syndrome. Mine kicked in hard here — I’d felt like I needed to reinvent myself and prove something, when in the end none of it helped me reach my goal. It just kept me from focusing on the art.

SDF Nodes

Shortly before SDF was supported natively in Designer, I'd already built my own toolset — though it was only 2D, so it lacked some functionality. For the chains in the Chained Rune Stone material, I wanted to make use of the superb normals you can generate with SDFs. I quickly ran into a problem, though: the Shape Splatter v2 — the core node for the SDF system — doesn't natively allow per-instance variation. That meant I couldn't get a 90-degree shift around a certain axis per iteration, which was needed to avoid intersections and keep things realistic. Whether because of a technical constraint or my own lack of familiarity with the system, it just wasn’t possible to carry the data from scattering to the rotation function. I was left with a huge node and long compute times just to produce a single chain segment, when I needed at least two, ideally three or four, for organic variation.

The solution came from the SDF Viewer node, which as I understand it is a pre-stage for testing functions before moving through to the Shape Splatter. It can debug your SDF functions — bounding box volume, position, depth, and more. I used the debugger to shape the depth output, manipulating the bounding box until I had the chain segment centered and auto-leveled. Disabling all overlays left me with a depth output encoded in a gradient, and a simple grayscale conversion in 16-bit gave me the chain height in roughly one hundredth of the compute time, with much better UV coverage.

Creating variations from there was straightforward: I could simply adjust the rotation range as needed. To connect the segments into a chain, I decided against splines — they’re too heavy to compute, and hard to manipulate as a parameter — and instead wrote my own rope function inside the FX-Map. I could define a start and end point and let the function handle gravity and hanging physics.

Coming Full Circle

Looking back, there are things I'd approach differently — and I'd call bullshit on anyone who couldn't say the same. I’m not saying that you should always pursue perfection, but reflecting on your steps and deciding what you’d handle differently is vital for growth.

Here, that reflection is less about doing things differently and more about the insight I gained midway through the project. A lot of the materials I wanted to build left me stuck on how to execute certain details. I found myself studying the work of artists I admire, spending more time in the reference stage than I probably ever had before. Several ideas got tossed because I couldn't craft them visually the way I'd envisioned.

It also brought something into focus that I'd had in the back of my mind for a while. I'm not as inspired by material creation as I once was, and that had been holding me back. I've come to call this series my grand finale — my motivation returned when I realized I could do it one last time with excellence, and then move on to fields I feel genuinely more drawn to.

In a sense, the Shattered World Signature Collection brings me full circle. When I saw the very first Signature Collection — Daniel Thiger's — all I could talk about with my wife was one day having my own. Back then, I didn’t even have a portfolio yet, and I was trying to figure out how to create my own Signature Collection. Now, this collection marks the end of a chapter for me, and it feels like a true accomplishment.

The Shattered World Signature Collection, by Kai Mergener, is available now on Substance 3D Assets.