(wip) Cursed bell desert valley environment

Larry

Hey guys! I just finished a modular diorama and now I'm up for a daylight environment, to up my game and complement my portfolio pieces !

Story

An old nomad tribe settled in these forsaken lands... Someone had to. Someone who knew how to pass down their knowledge,someone who knew the stories,faced the toughness, forged by time and weather, master of the elements...
Someone....
They took upon themselves the task of guarding this bell, for it must not be rang, or the awakening of an ancient creature will bring doom and chaos, swiftly ending the world as we know it.
Gathered every sealing technique known to man, they now try to protect human kind from this otherworldly threat, and malicious people trying to possess it...

This was my original environment idea with some quick (spent the whole night) photo bashing, and the mood board for the props. The bell must have a huge and heavy feeling, and probably lot's of different seals, but the one I have in the picture has this "African voodoo curse" vibe as well so I'll try to incorporate it into the design.

 


After gathering reference from desert cliffs (mostly petra and wadi rum desert) I decided a better strategical point would be to have the bell in the air, or wedged in the ground so that nobody can move the interior, but that will be decided later. 

For greyboxing, I made a cliff intersection with multiple high ground visibility points from 3 directions, that serves as a good defensive point.However, I'll be making the modular rocks and then making a decision for a final layout.


Till then, toodaloo!

Larry

Hello! I did a first pass on the rocks, created the shader and added some placeholder materials from free asset packs. Now that i'm looking at it, it probably needs another layer of sculpting,and each rock should have its own individual uv set instead of all being packed in one. Later on i'm going to try some radial tiling and macro variations then make LOD's and maybe some simple collision meshes for the rocks and have a path the player can climb from.
It's already having a hit on my crappy PC performance, so, optimize optimize optimize!

Also gonna try a runtime virtual texture since dither temporal AA is not really good for such huge meshes.
After all these tests i'll be making some sand+rock piles, and sculpt the landscape to match the rocks as well and give it some variation. Lots to do!

C U later!