Fantasy Environment - WIP
polycounter lvl 13
Hey guys, so I have really no skills as far as hand painted stylized art, I figured I give it a shot, but I'm really nervous and would appreciate any advice and help given. I picked a D3 concept by Victor Lee, and made a quick blockout. Workflow that I'm thinking atm is, model all the pieces, unwrap and then do some sculpting in zbrush and finally texturing, unless anyone else have a better way to approach this kind of art. The poly range will be aimed for Blizzard-WoW specs. Please crits! 
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When you look at that tree, think of how modular it is, how some basic shapes were simply covered with a good base texture and the lighting does a lot of the work for you. Some nice deformations were used, but not a ton of painstaking texture work or UVing of a strange geometric object.
Obviously for a hand painted piece you'd want to use larger chunks for the base structure to get a larger "pallet" to paint on, but this gives a good idea of what i was trying to get at. Work smarter not harder...
As for the rest of the block in, looks like you have too many stairs, I'd take it down to just 3 steps, maybe 4 and really nail those. Keep your assets meaty so your hand painting can stand out.
I'd also say you're going too low poly if you're aiming for a WOW tri count. Make your scene look incredible, it's a portfolio piece, not a peice for the upcoming wow expansion pack, even those have ever increasing tri counts. If you're going to spend weeks working in zbrush to create nice organic hand painted assets, you might as well show them off. If you decide down the line you want a low poly version, it's a simple matter of removing edge loops and doing another bake, but it'd be a shame to throw away awesomeness for no reason right off the bat that you can't get back. Low poly art will impress some studios, righteously awesome high poly stuff impresses EVERYONE, and that includes the dude who may be in charge of actually giving your portfolio to someone with an artistic eye. The guy who looked my stuff over at GDC from blizzard didn't seem to care so much about tri count or texture size, he wanted to see environment art that had been lovingly crafted with insane attention to detail. It's kinda like Glenn always says, it's 10% skill and craftsmanship, 90% awesome.
As for advice on hand painting with High Poly objects... Do most of it in zbrush dude. The best textures work together, the diffuse fits nicely over the normal map and geometry. Just looking at the concept, almost all the detail is in the shape of the objects, only small color and tone variances can be seen in the objects. Really Nail the high poly sculpt (with a hand painted style) and the rest of the hand painting practically does itself. You can also rely on the colored lighting bouncing off the normals and some rim lighting to sell the hand painted nature of the scene. I found a random image from darksiderss:
If you look around at the scenery, you'll notice there isn't much detail in the diffuse or spec outside of standard fair copy paste brickwork. They really just nail the normals in key areas and let the lighting do the work. If you spend too much time on diffuse and spec all your hours of work in zbrush starts to fade away.
But enough rambling!
Really like the concept, simple and has some interesting lighting that's going to be fairly easy to pull off in UDK while still kicking it up a notch. It's got everything you need and nothing you don't. If this is half as good as your fountain it's gonna be killer dude, excited to see what you do with this!
Enjoying the concepts so far Diwan! I can't wait to see more progress =]