The Set Up: Log #3

21/02/2022

Refinement

This week I'm spending most of my time actually beautifying the scene now - yay!

Here, I've added the most important aspects and assets for this set-up, and took this screenshot from where the player would start. The composition is of course very important, so I tend to come back to this angle a lot to check how everything looks.

Here, I have annotated what I think to be the optimal pathing for this scene.

At this moment, I just need to work on emphasising this pathing a lot more. I plan to do this by of course adding the wooden plank pathway in my initial sketch, making the dirt path more noticeable by adding some darker colour variation, and of course generally just adding more things that really frame the player's eye to be drawn towards the goal here.

I would like to point out the use of fog in my scene, as I really love the atmosphere it creates here. Not only does it really emphasise the goal of a "mystical feel", I think that it also works in really framing the composition of this scene, making things that are essentially irrelevant to the main objective (e.g; the mountains and floating islands in the background) less noticeable.

With the giant mushroom castle being visually the most striking thing in this scene by use of not only colour theory, size, verticality, but now the atmospheric fog and lighting, I feel like it really does emphasise the progression goal here.

Since I wanted to showcase my texturing work for this brief, I actually found having everything oversized not only helped to enhance the magical fantasy aesthetic, but also literally just makes my materials easier to see - which I am very happy about! Of course, how would you be able to see all the details in my mushroom materials if they were a more realistic size?!

22/02/2022

Here, I sort of got to the point of wondering what to add next to really make this scene feel complete. My character design lecturer, Naomi, suggested that I may be looking at this from a 3D perspective too much, and suggested trying doing a quick paint over my Unreal screenshot. We ended up going back and forth tweaking things and adding things as you can see! My main concern was that the composition was not where I felt it should be, but with the editing above you can see that I was able to create a sort of 'artificial viginette' with my assets, framing my scene even more.

Now it's just time to translate the 2D to 3D!

23/02/2022

Final!

Overall this project was a lot of fun! I'm really happy with how it turned out, and I honestly want to come back to this scene periodically and update it in my own time with future materials and assets.