U70 Environment Art Contest

Environment Art Contest

"Using your creativity and ability to work within the World of Warcraft art style, create a small environment diorama that would fit well in the game world. Your quest: Concept, model, and texture an environment piece that you could imagine stumbling upon during your travels across Kalimdor, the Eastern Kingdoms, Outland, Northrend, Pandaria, the Broken Isles, or Argus.

Required elements are trees, rocks, grass, and props, plus a small structure (such as a shrine).

Your final piece should have a structure similar to the example provided below. We're looking for lower poly-count models (e.g.: around 1,500 polys for a mature sized tree), so keep that in mind when creating your environment.

The final submission should be a high resolution JPEG file no larger than 5MB."

I've actually been playing the latest expansion of World of Warcraft over the past few months and the updated art style has really grabbed my attention, because of that I've decided to make my scene in the same updated style as opposed to the, in my opinion, less refined, slightly older style. I am taking the majority of my inspiration from the new alliance zones, "Stormsong Valley" and "Tiragarde Sound".

For design reference of the area I want to make, I'm using a mixture of zones from the newest content of "World of Warcraft, 'Battle for Azeroth'". This style is a blend of low-poly models, hand painted textures and strong, yet muted colours. These components come together to make a unique aesthetic that borders on realistic while retaining its somewhat "cartoony" heritage.

I started by blocking out the design of the scene using a basic height-mapped and edited plane for the ground, preset trees and a quick low-poly fence. One element I knew I wanted was a sense of direction given by the dip in the hills, the lamps leading that way and the trees leaning inwards.

Given that I'd added lamps in the scene it felt wasteful not to take advantage of a good night scene. so I added emission and a light source in each lamp, darkened the scene and add an HDRI set at night.

The next step was to make my own "wow style" trees and continue to adjust the lighting for the scene.

The scene started feeling like I was picturing from my references so I kept on adding detail and variation in the form of pathways for more direction, a birdhouse and tree detail.

The ground felt quite empty at this point so I further added detail in the form of rocks pebbles, an extra lamp for the tree and a hand-painted texture for the chicken coop.

I managed to create a texture for the ground and started exploring texturing the trees, although the first couple tries didn't go too well.

Now the scene really started taking shape I wanted to make the whole thing more ominous to give it some mystery and generally make it feel like it fit more with the current World of Warcraft night zones. I did this by adding fog to the scene as well as changing a few material colours to more muted, dark tones.

While I liked the fog the general colour palette still didn't feel like a Wow area. After looking at some more in game screenshots for reference I realised that almost all of the night scenes in wow have a very strong blue hue so I started working toward getting that aswell as finishing my tree texture and starting to add some foliage.

The next major step for me was getting as much textured as I could, the main item being the rocks that stood out far too much for my liking. In the process of texturing the rocks I actually found a new way of making low-poly style rocks and decided to use those for my scene. I also realised that I'd lost a lot of detail in the right-hand hill after adding fog so i decided to add an extra hanging light to bring back some detail and to add some depth.

There are now just 2 things I want to do to complete my scene fully. Mainly adding proper foliage to the scene, this includes both grass and more stylised leaves for the trees. Both cases of foliage should really be made using opacity maps and hand-painted designs, although doing this has been an issue so far. I also want to texture the fence and lamps properly.

Due to the hand-in date being so close at this point I'm going to have to sacrifice the polish of this scene for the completion of the blog section.

From the start of this project I've had a fairly clear view of how I wanted the scene to look, the only major difference was in the decision to make it a night-time scene instead of bright and sunny. This changed a lot of aspects of the project to a much more mysterious and eerie feel.

I've also been strict in making sure that all 3D models I've made for the scene I have kept to an absolute minimal poly-count, this helps with the frame-rate and overall performance of the entire project, while keeping in the Warcraft theme.

The only real issue I've had with this project is my lack of knowledge when it comes to making unique opacity maps and transparent textures for the foliage. Although I am more than capable of learning the process that goes in to making these, I just prioritised other matters first and ended up not having the time to go back to it. In the same vein as the grass, if I compare my ground/grass texture with actual "Wow" textures the quality difference is very apparent. Where I just created a general mottled green/brown texture for my ground, in Warcraft they actually hand-paint a fairly intricate flat grass texture, as well as adding separate foliage using opacity, as mentioned earlier. Examples for this can be found in the above references.

If I were to start this project again, one of the main things I would change is the foreground focus. Right now the chicken coop is the only major thing drawing your eye and although this does coincidentally push focus elsewhere, I'd much rather have something more substantial and interesting to focus on close up.

Comments:

Daniel: "I like the look of the scene, it does look very similar to some of the reference images. One thing I would want to change is how thick the fog is, I feel like it covers too much of the scene."

Reply-Harri: "Thanks for the feedback! I completely agree, The fog was one of the hardest part about this scene. Although the tool I was using is great, There does seem to be some significant limitations, specifically with how much you can change the density. I do plan to find different methods of creating a lighter, less dense fog."