Recently, I've been playing around with multiple different ideas. Trying to engage in more personal projects; I've decided to work on a diorama styled environment. Seeing as I haven't done one in quite some time, I thought it would be interesting to see the visual fidelity I can achieve in this.
After playing games like dark souls, and mortal shell, I wanted to create something that had a similar tone and feeling; creating a throne with a skeleton king sat in it, candle lit and broken down architecture should do the trick right? Well maybe, maybe not! To top that off, I've always been a fan of games that have used 'floaty islands' In their game play, such as dishonoured. So this gives me the opportunity to give it a go myself with my own take on it.
For now, I've been doing something a little out of my comfort zone, concepting my environment from a quick UE4 blockout, and then doing a paint over in Photoshop, this has been a good learning experience, being able to sketch out some ideas allows me to quickly iterate with different compositions that I could translate into my 3D environment. By no means am I a master 2D artist, But it's definitely an interesting change of pace which I'll be looking into more in the future in hope that it will feed back into my 3D work and help me create better, more visually interesting environments.
Next Steps:
3D Time! I'm going to start to work on some of the primary assets in the environment; the Throne, Floaty Island, light fixtures and Window structure. I'm going to leave the skeleton for the last 'finishing touch' I think adding this will breathe a lot of character into the environment so I want to take my time in getting the execution right with it. I'm confident I'll be able to get the rest to a complete stage much faster and therefore will be quicker to get the overall scene's setting and intention translated into the 3D environment.