Painting and Sculpting

Originally Posted August 21, 2009

Hello again! So the past couple of weeks have been rather chaotic with various things going on taking trips out for reference photos, family visiting and advancing another year closer to old age, hence the lack of an update last week. However this means I now have a lot more progress to show off this time around!

Since my last update I have been focusing on getting three things done; firstly creating and applying basic textures for the terrain e.g. rock, sand grass etc, and lastly, painting and sculpting the terrain. In this pass my goal was to create the most convincing landscape possible without the use of any models or additional assets. This was mainly to push myself to make use of the crazy amount of displacements in the map and also to ensure the textures I was producing were of a good enough quality to stand on their own, the results of which can be seen below:

 After a slow start, mainly just finding a style and palette which I was comfortable with, I’ve found progress has been pretty smooth and I’m almost complete with the terrain on the first level, I think another couple of days and it should be all up to the same standard as you see here. Most of the lighting and sky is placeholder and I plan on spending more time on this a bit further down the road.

One other thing I think worth mentioning is that I’m experimenting with using a sky dome instead of a skybox. Two reasons for this are that 1.) It’s a hell of a lot easier to make a hemispherical texture and 2.) It’s super easy to update it (no having to edit and re-save 6 individual textures and hope for the best) Only downside to this is that for some reason models in the skybox don’t get rendered in cube maps or water so for now I’ve had to hack in a basic colour skybox behind the sky dome so that reflections look relatively ok. If anyone knows a way around this please let me know!

Finally Ben Andrews has been plugging away as always on the concept art, this time refining the lighthouse painting so that it is more consistant with the more recent style of paintings he has done lately.

 … and also helping me brainstorm some extra eyecandy for the Valley on the first level

 His lighthouse piece will also be on display at IndieCade where Dan Pinchbeck will be entering Dear Esther in the independant games competition – Good luck guys!