New environment

Started creating the environment for the new story. Still far from finished. In addition, the image above is way too dark. Looks like it’s under water somehow.

References for the desert is mainly the environment from the trailer for Beyond Good & Evil 2:

Clearly, I’m not there yet. I’ll cut down on the general blueness, make the sky brighter and add a trifle of green to it. I also need to tweak the ground texture, add the road and make the grass look better. The mountains need to be remade as well and Andreas is going to create a matte painting for the sky and hindmost mountain ranges.

The scene also calls for certain props, such as a dead tree, a camp site, a tent in various stages of shabbiness and a flower amongst other things. For the tree I found some nice reference images taken in the Namib desert. I then started modeling with a cylinder as the starting point and using basic techniques, such as extrusion and cuts to create the shape. The tree needs about a dozen more branches, but it’s late so I’ll finish tomorrow.

As you can see, I’m experimenting with the grass and ground texture here as well, as I consider the ground to be one of the hardest parts to get right. Getting a vast, flat plane to look like a desert that holds up well, both close to and far from the ground, requires very little modeling, but quite a bit of texturing. This last image didn’t turn out particularly well, but at least the WIP tree is in there