Concept Art For Environment

http://conceptartworld.com/?p=31005

 

 

http://conceptartworld.com/?p=31005

 

Above is concept art I found on concept art world by Pavel Elagin, who has worked on projects such as Bioshock 2, XCOM and the newly released film The Lego Movie.

I chose to add his work in my research because I liked the way the colours complimented each other and were not harsh in tone. The environments he drew helped me to think of how ours could look and what could be in it to create a sense of someone inhabiting it.

The colours set the mood immediately so I thought that using certain colours would help evoke the type of feeling we want felt in the environment.

 

 

Since we knew that we wanted the environment set in a cave, I looked at cave drawings and caves in the real world from limestone caves to river caves so that I could broaden the research. I learnt that a lot of these caves had sources where light came in and this made us make top circular opening in our cave as the main light source of it. I think that worked well for the final look of the cave because the big tree grows out of it creates a good composition.

 

 

The image below of the cave inspired us to make our cave glow in certain areas, because the colours in the image work so well it also helped us consider changing the colour palette to shades of blues and purples. I later learned that this image is from the video game Dear Esther where their caves are lit beautifully throughout the game like this.

 

 http://dear-esther.com/

 

 Below are a couple drawings I did for the environment, we wanted it be placed in a forest with a cave in it, so the first image below has trees in the forefront while the two rock boulders are acting as an entrance to the cave.

This image below is to see how the cave might look inside, there are spikes at the top and a stream with a boardwalk in it. These drawings are at a very early stage in the pre-production.

 

Below is the concept art that Sophie (http://sophiecurwen.blogspot.co.uk/) did for the environment and the troll character. Again these are early in the pre-production stage but some have become the final look that we went for.

My role is to model, UV Map and Texture the environment which I shall have to adopt the style in which Sophie has painted the environment so at least they look similar. 

The two images below is when Sophie was thinking about making the cave look Sci-Fi like, and I really like the choice of colour palette in the drawings but we decided to make it tribal and historic than futuristic. We still kept the idea of having glowing rocks in the final version.

 

 

 

Below is the final look we decided on for the environment, I used Sophie's drawings as the reference for when I textured and modelled the environment. We also changed the colour palette to a dark shade mix of blues, greens, purples and greys so when we add the glow effect it will stand out against the dark background of the cave.

 

 

 In the image below, Sophie was experimenting with what the treasured object in the cave would look like, we went with the drawing on the far left and it works well in the environment as you can see in the images below where it is located inside the big tree.