"Celestial Terrace" Blizzard Student Contest Submission

alexrc

Hey guys!
I wanted to post my final submission for this years Blizzard Student Art Contest.

I wanted to go for something persian-esque. Grabbed tons of reference from Sinbad concept art, Aladdin, as well as in-game WoW locations like Val'sharah and Suramar. 

Any feedback/critique would be great! 

praetus

This is a really great start.  I like the tree work especially. If I had one critique it would be that things are very dark overall.  I would use svalue to help guide the eye towards the building.  Comparing to some of the Suramar prop kits, the roads are  a bit lighter.  https://www.artstation.com/artwork/W3PBJ

alexrc

Thanks for the feedback! 

Bluelord1

looks great! I think its a strong contender for grand prize! You may want to check out the Handpainters guild if you haven't already, its a discord server of stylized artist, including a few previous winners https://handpaintersguild.com/ you can check out the discord from there and post it on the critique chat for more feedback. Best of luck I really think you have a good shot!

Bluelord1

also I checked out your try for last year. MASSIVE improvement man! do you have any advice in terms of improving at the art style? Im entering the contest this year but It's really more for a learning experience for next years contest.

alexrc

Thanks man! Yep, I just joined the handpainters guild! 

For advice, I would say just study the style hardcore.Their style is whimsical, but dialed in with a strong sense of believably, whether its natural elements or man-made. For the hand-paintedness, its just practice and practice, while always having strong reference. Tons of great videos on youtube if you don't want to pay for any educational content. Otherwise, theres tons of great resources for stylized texturing that you can find on sites like 3DMotive, brushforge, and gumroad!

Good luck with your submission as well! 

Bluelord1

Awesome thanks for the advice man!
One last thing, do you have any advice for Wow lighting in unreal? its the software I'm using and I did some stuff like turn off tonemapper, eye adaption and global illumination and deleted lower from my skylight but it still seems off.
Anyway good luck to you though I don't think you need it!

alexrc

Bluelord1 said:

Awesome thanks for the advice man!
One last thing, do you have any advice for Wow lighting in unreal? its the software I'm using and I did some stuff like turn off tonemapper, eye adaption and global illumination and deleted lower from my skylight but it still seems off.
Anyway good luck to you though I don't think you need it!

What I did was use post processing and a volumetric fog and just kept tweaking the settings until I got the look that's similar to the game. I also made sure that my textures werent affected by any of PBR like roughness or metal. I made a node and set it to 0 and attached it to both settings for each material. I also use the standard skybox for the stars and colors of the sky since the skybox helps color the scene and sort of bring it all together.

Linus Asplund however just recently made a great tutorial for getting a closer look to the WoW style in Unreal, so I'd recommend checking that out as well!

Bluelord1

yeah I saw that! also Shem dawson the lead dungeon artist posted his unreal settings under his blog tab on artstation if you'd wanna check that out. Thanks for the help man and best of luck!