The Full Process

First, research was done to find exactly what makes the Dark Souls art style its own unique style, this was done by storyboarding many different elements of their series such as interior, exterior, enemy encounter design, and armor design. Then I planned the environment that I wanted to model, it was gonna be between an outdoor arena, a cave, or a gothic church.

A very rough sketch of the general layout on paper to help me visualize

 Then a 3D scene sketch was done to more realistically determine the size of the church, colors, lighting, and the positions of objects. Some general camera movements were added as well to see how they would change the mood of the scene.

Benches were modeled based on park benches (this was an oversight). This intended to exhibit a wider variety of modeling techniques, such as using an array along a path to create the planks consistently spaced (image above). Using bezier curves to create the metal sides, and adjusting their width and model shape to make detail in easily adjustable methods. 

Texturing for the wood was imported, then adjusted using nodes to increase contrast, and tint them red. The metal was textured by me, creating a base metal color and reflectivity, then adding imperfections such as scratches to make it look more natural.

The pillars and the floor were modeled with a minimal number of polygons since the imported texture adds details and depth. The same goes for the walls, except using a different imported texture.  

The door was modeled in one half that was later mirrored, the planks on the door were cut from the main surface, and then extruded. The black hinges were, unfortunately, unoptimized since I used double subdivide effects, which added unnecessary ext polygon count to the scene.

The torches on the wall were simple to model, the fire had a 3D noise texture which is what added the wave effect. Meanwhile, the light that was cast is from a separate light source which I used a mathematical sin wave function to have the repetitive up and down movement. 

The candle model was straightforward from a cylinder, with a bit of sculpting to add imperfection and the simulated wax droplets. But as for the texture, I had to carefully tune the subsurface scattering level to realistically reflect how a candle has light leaking through the wax. Reference was used to cross-examine my results, and see what worked best.

(Labeled node tree to explain what they do)

The vines that can be seen everywhere is an object node function, in which it would create a brown cylinder object (the stem) across the bezier path. Then another node would randomly spawn leaves (4 polygon shapes, which could have been optimized more) along the surface of the stem with varying sizes and rotation. To make it look even more natural, I created a node tree to the leaf texture (which was a flat image with transparency) that would change its saturation at every instance spawned of the leaf. Using this function and drawing bezier curves on the surface allowed me to easily hand draw the vines across objects, rather than manually creating lines and aligning them.

The coffin was initially modeled from a cube, but then another model was created for the cross, and then I would use that to create a boolean effect, to carve the cross onto the coffin. The carpet that the coffin lays on top of is a very flat cube, with a high-contrast bump map. This bump map was a small-scale noise generation to act like the fiber of the carpet.

Most of the lighting comes through large area lights at every window, these were adjusted throughout the scene building, as I experimented with daylighting nighttime blue hues, and close to sunset, which I ended up choosing since it fits the cinematic mood of the scene. Fill lights were arrayed on top of the benches to even out the brightness, the candles and torches added some light as well but not too harsh. 

Area fog was added and adjusted accordingly with the light since it tended to wash out the rendered image in addition to the bloom levels. The color of the fog would also be adjusted during post-compositing as some filters I added later on changed the overall color balance to very warm colors. 

The floating dust particles come from a particle emission system, in which it spawns slow-moving, randomly sized transparent objects. This combined with DoF really showed off the size and how far some objects were from the camera elegantly and naturally, the same as that you could expect from an abandoned location. 

At first, each candle had its own spotlight on it, but later on, when the number increased, I learned that the render engine had some limitations. Eevee could only render 128 lights in a scene, and so the candle clumps were adjusted to only have one spotlight at the center. This still gave the sub-surface effect I was going after, although less accurate with a single light source for all four candles.

(Labeled node tree to explain what they do) 

A lot of post-compositing was added to create and match the final mood of the scene with what I planned from the beginning. A light vignette effect was added to create the mood of mystery. A noise layer was created out of a 2D noise map, this added more to the realism aspect, as well as the rustic vibe an abandoned goth place would give. Color grading, contrast, brightness, and gamma were all continuously adjusted as the scene was built to correctly light the scene. Initially, I also had much higher values for the bloom, but after some input from others, I decided to decrease it for more object clarity.

For the camera movement, I had a couple of rules set in mind for the shots. I ensured to use either the rule of thirds, or symmetry for the shots to lead the eyes through the scenes. I also tried to have three elements in each scene, a foreground, a main object focus, and a background. This helps keep the scene busy and lively while maintaining a correct perception of depth, position, and movement.