Mountain Cottage WIP

kdm3d

Well, in my brief break from contracting, I thought I work on my own little project to pass the time. One thing I see in a lot of game titles these days is either the same old harsh lighting with post apocolyptic themes, uber sci-fi, or over the top cartoonyness. I think games have gotten these styles down well, levels are GORGEOUS when viewed with this in mind. So whats next? how can we push current tech any further to achieve a more artistic end result?

With all this in mind I went to the style of Disney, and a scene from Thumbelina for my inspiration. It has almost a Thomas Kincaid feel to it, with nice soft lighting and a warm "homey" feeling. I would love to see popular game art move in this direction, to make each level a painting, a work of art move back to the traditional side of artwork. So here it goes!

Its a WIP thread, so please all C+C's and suggestions welcome, dont hold back! We never improve if all we hear is "that looks great!"

Inspiration image:


And a basic terrain render (MAX)



Next step for me is to take the terrain into zbrush. I'll keep it as a low resolution mesh there just to finish creating the basic terrain. Any highres stuff on the terrain will be done later...

Dracula

Could you post a wireframe of the terrain please?
It seams like the polygons in those mountains are really stretched and that would not be good for sculpting(zbrush loves square polygons).
I think you should do the terrain directly in zbrush , starting from a plane.

Hope this was helpful.

kdm3d

Yeah, they were pretty stretched in that scene. I smoothed all that out in zbrush, and added a lot of surface interest in the scene. (I hate these early stages where it always looks crappy) Anyway, wire and sculpting pictured below. On to tweaking and optimizing!