WIP - Handpainted Fantasy Swamp

StormAndy

Hey guys,

I've started working on a hand painted swamp scene for an Top down isometric game I'm prototyping in UE4. Here is some reference for the kind of camera Angle I'm going for.




The environment will need to be a small battle arena with points at which enemies can spawn in and enter the battle area in which the player can roam around. I've started painting and modelling some assets. Below is an image of the individual pieces i have made





and these are the assets I have assembling from those pieces so far



If anyone knows of any good reference for hand painted fantasy and animation films of swamps that would be really helpful I really like the night/dark lighting in the swamps from the 3D film Avatar.

-Andy

brum

Cool plants and textures.
Did you paint over a real texture for your bark? I should try that, seems like a cool way to get decent colors.

StormAndy

For the bark I did a concept art kinda of mash up I use for matte/speed paintings to get the base colours I find it helpful to leave some of the texture in as i struggle when things seem too clean to begin with.

I took some small samples of bark stretched them up overlaying them and used the "Colour Balance" tool in Photoshop to pull out the blues and greens more. 

I then flattened it and painted the bark lines over and sampled the colours whilst painting.

StormAndy

I sketched out a few root ideas during my lunch break. Thinking of scattering these at the bases of the trees on Alpha masked planes.

StormAndy

Started gathering more reference for continuing my trees and roots. I'm going to add more alpha masked pieces for:
-Moss patches
-Roots
then model some more unique geometry for the tree bases and damaged pieces of trunks. I would also like to create some thinner smaller trees in tangled clusters.

StormAndy

I've modelled and unwrapped some assets to paint, which i can further decorate my meshes with.



I've also made some planes which i can apply the root alphas to

Tectonic

this is looking really nice, I'm excited to watch your progress!

StormAndy

Tectonic said:

this is looking really nice, I'm excited to watch your progress!

thanks  

StormAndy

Spent another lunch break on painting the roots

Wendy de Boer

Nice stuff so far, I'm really liking the colors!

DilutedEgo

I love to watch these sorts of break downs since my own hand painting is so weak Can't wait to see the finished product.

StormAndy

Thanks I'll try explain the workflow for each step of the painting process.

I've spent this lunch on the bark and began adding moss in two layers.
I first used an overlay layer to gesture and tint areas of the bark i would like to add the moss.

I've then painted some chunkier moss patches in afterwards on top of the overlayed areas.

I'm going to move onto painting higher contrast shadows and highlights then adding eye candy lines/shading on next.

StormAndy

This lunch I've been using a finer dark brown/near black to add in bark and moss details, I will be doing a second pass with highlights in a lighter brown and green.

Marshkin

Really lovely work so far! My only piece of feedback would be that the moss on the tree trunks looks fairly neon. This makes it look less like moss and more like the trunk is catching a reflection of some neon green light.

StormAndy

Thanks I think it might be that the colours are quite simple so far and there isn't any details it appears like lights cast onto the bark. I've certainly added more blues in subtly its hard to decide on the shade of greens to use as they vary a lot in real life.

I've painted in some soft blue shadows and eye candy highlights and shadows now. In comparison to my leaves and branches the colour variation is pretty bland, I'm going to experiment with that and see what i can get.

StormAndy

I've started painting some of the props i made based on the reference i gathered for extra details.

StormAndy

Continued painting the props I've been trying out using more soft blue coloured shadows.

StormAndy

Continued painting my bark texture today, I've added in some fine details/lineart onto it.

Here's how it currently looks on a test asset in game engine

Kid.in.the.Dark

Reeeally have to say, bravo on the rendering of your textures... you really captured a comic book/children's book water colour style essence.

I know it's a test but however the lighting setup you've got in UE4 for your asset test is really unflattering and definitely degrades the lovely work you have on that texture right now... but again I know it's a test, keep going

StormAndy

Thanks yeah I'm newer to lighting this kind of art in unreal 4. I haven't touched it much yet, I'm trying not to get ahead of myself.

I'm a little worried my textures grayscale values might be a bit weak for the bark at the moment. I'm going to check them over and see what i can do.

Kid.in.the.Dark

To be perfectly honest, that would be a waste of time right now... it's one texture in the midst of an entire environment... so I do urge you to have a solid block out in UE4 first before you work anymore into the texture... only then can you really tell whether your tonal values are too harsh or too washed out, you'll require a lot more in your scene to really tell what's happening in relation to each other.

By block out I do also mean perhaps some rough textures with block values with maybe one blend pass to get the ball rolling.

StormAndy

Yeah, unfortunately I can't really do my lighting and block at out at lunchtime. All I can do for now is try and get my textures as nice as possible until i get a free evening to get it all together.

ivanzu

Don't worry too much about lighting you can tweak it using Color Correction texture.