Originally Posted August 2, 2009

After a month of pure chaos I’m happy to say I’m now finally settled and sorted over here back in the UK and over the past week have been getting stuck into Dear Esther’s development once again.

Been a pretty slow week just finding my feet again and most of all finding a good place to start on the huge task ahead. I initially started doing some rough texture work for the terrain but quickly realised that it was more important to have a nicely sculpted landscape on which to base the artwork. The video below is a time-lapse video of just some of the sculpting that’s been going on this week. This has mainly been quite effortless due to the preparations I undertook early on and am hoping over the next week to have the first level fully sculpted out ready for a texture pass later on:

Once the texture pass is complete I plan to start detailing the landscape with more models and working on some of the larger structures such as the lighthouse at the beginning of the map. Speaking of which Ben Andrews redesigned the lighthouse a little to help it fit more suitably within the environment, with the following result:

So far things have come off to a good start and I hope to also do a bit of research visiting some of the coastal areas near to me to get some quality photo refs to help the development along (depending on how crap the weather is!).