Final piece - Marauder's Auction Compound

 Inspiration : Feng Zhu -

Before starting this piece, I decided to watch some Feng Zhu design school videos and speed paints to gen an understanding of how to draw an environment piece without using line art. the two videos I looked at were "Making Of The Siege by Feng Zhu" and "Design Cinema – EP 35 - Digital Landscape Part 01".  Both of these videos show a very clear workflow that Feng Zhu follows, below I took some screenshots from the Making of the Siege video to get a better understanding of how he creates his work. It is to note that Feng Zhu does work very intuitively, usually with no base or working on top of a photo, whereas I will be working on top of a 3D model meaning I'm fairly limited in how freeform i can be [this isn't necessarily a bad thing, I don't quite have the confidence with brushstrokes and enough trust in my process yet to be able to make a good freeform image like he can, though this will come with practice]. Feng Zhu starts out in blocking values, placing in light, then slowly working in details, focusing more on composition and the general readability of a scene first and foremost before delving into any details. This allows him to not only work much quicker, but also make a very eye catching and cinematic looking art piece. He also uses level editing and tricks like viewing his piece from afar to ensure the contrast of his work makes his pieces easy to understand and immediately eye catching.

Below is the collection of screenshots i took to better understand his process, you can see he takes values from both the light, mid tones, and darkest areas of his canvas to push and pull to create bold shapes, from there, he adds in the lighting to his scene and slowly begins to define shapes using the light source and she shadows. You can see this best in how he has defined the spikes and face of the beast along with the armour on the soldiers below. Right at the very end, he adds in the final little details that really help tell the story that is taking place, the light spear tips guide you through the scene and make it obvious to the fight that is taking place. I think that this gradual introduction of texture and lighting will make tackling my composition much less intimidating as opposed to rendering every single tiny detail.

I chose Feng Zhu as my benchmark artist as his environments are cinematic, easy to understand and engross the viewer in a certain feeling. Each one of his scenes feel immersive, and do an excellent job at narrating a story. These pieces below you immediately get a good feel for what the genre of this world is, what the temperature is like in each climate, the oppressive or mysterious feeling of each location, and this was something i wanted to incorporate into my own work.

Making my final piece -

Moving onto the creation of my final piece, I first selected the screenshot that i wanted to use as reference and used the extract line tool in FireAlpaca to better see the shapes that are in my scene. What is really nice about using a 3D model is that the grid beneath my model works as an excellent reference for my perspective grid, meaning I don't have to go through the process seen in Feng Zhu's design school video in which you locate the perspective from a photograph. I locked this layer and dropped down the opacity to around 15%, also placing this layer on multiply so that i could see my drawing underneath whilst still having a reference to work off of.

I blocked out the area where the dirt floor would be as well as placing in the back wall, this gives me a foundation to put my buildings on top of. I then rendered in the terrain using some images of muddy ground and battlefields that i found online. I wanted the ground to seem uneven, boggy, and full of puddles, which i hope would give a generally unpleasant look to this scene, I will later place in some rain which will hopefully push this feeling a little further. at this point I'm not too worried about shadows, i will block that in later and all at once so i can focus more on making my textures look believable.

From this point onward i remembered to turn on the time-lapse function so that i could document my entire process. As you can see i block in the buildings and shadows using the polygon fill tool, then i add in some textures [although not seen in the time-lapse, i was following my hero building reference guide to understand how to put in the weathered concrete textures]. this isn't exactly how Feng Zhu makes his environment pieces as i can't work as fluidly as he can, though i tried to follow the same principle of getting down my base shapes first, then working in my details later on. This approach was much less stressful than drawing the entire building completely rendered all at once. Something i was really happy with in this piece was how i drew the red lights on top of the watchtower, I used a gradient and used the shadow and highlights to define the ridges in the once smooth surface, I used a reference off to the side and I'm honestly really proud of how it turned out. I also used the atmospheric fog trick that we learnt a few months back to separate my scenes elements into the foreground, midground and background. It also added to the overall foggy and rainy environment in this scene. As my shadows were all placed on one layer, all i had to do was turn that layer on a multiply layer and then go back in to deepen some shadows in areas where the light [coming from the top right corner] would not reach. I then experimented with secondary light sources from the car headlamps, streetlights and watchtower, however i noticed having all of these being a similar strength made this piece seem cluttered without a main point of focus. To fix this issue i dimmed the streetlamps and car headlights, placing the main focus on the lights in the foreground and lights from the watchtower, hopefully placing focus on the main hero building in the midground. My final steps were to adjust the lighting to separate the red lights from the compound below, making the compound much darker, and adding in the rain to help push the oppressive feeling of this piece. In terms of colour pallet, i also used a cooler pallet to help with this feeling too. This painting was mainly drawn with the marker brush with pen pressure based opacity turned off, i wanted harsher edges to avoid the elements in this scene being hazy and unrefined, I also used the airbrush tool for foggy lighting, the cloud brush for background haze, and the pen brush to draw in the streetlamps and the small goblin figures as this forced me to be more sketchy and loose with my shapes. I also followed Feng Zhu's advice to save several versions throughout the process to make sure i can go back if something went wrong, as i also usually merge all my layers down to be a bit more merciful on my PC, this is something that has come back to bite me in the past, and whilst i found i didn't need to go back to a previous version on this piece, it was reassuring to know that i could if i needed to, and i will be more proactive to save my work in the future.

Final version with and without spotlights - Pre feedback -

At this stage, I felt that i was somewhat done and that i should step away before i overwork this piece, I liked some elements of this art piece however something did feel off about it. I couldnt decide if it was the lighting affecting the readability of the piece so i made sure to save two versions of it to get some feedback on, one with the spotlights, and one without. I did hope i could include the spotlights as this is something really important to the purpose of this compound within my game. I also want to note that i chose the aspect ration 1920x1080 for this piece to mimic the aspect ratio of a computer monitor. As stated before , the purpose of this scene would be used as a loading screen to show the player the next area they are about to go into. I then stepped away from this piece and then returned with a fresh set of eyes ready for some feedback.

With spotlights

Without spotlights

Feedback, Level editing and additional lighting -

After showing my final drawing to my tutor as well as some peers, they agreed that the watchtower lights was the better of the two final versions, however my tutor thought that adding some light beams from above could help the viewer understand where the circles of light were coming from. He liked the strong light on top of the van and i agree that just adding that little extra bit of light really helped the illuminated ground below look more light a spotlight. I also went back in and adjusted the levels and contrast further as well as using a tone curve to make the illuminated areas stand out a little more. I am much happier with this piece now, i think it looks more focused and generally gloomier than my past version. I also went ahead and made a little mockup of this piece as a loading screen. I created the font for NEMESIS by taking elements of the pre-existing Deadzone logo and putting them together to build the letters M, I and S. I am really proud of this piece, i think there are places i could have improves such as looking at my values and overall composition [in the 3D block out phase] as well as maybe being a little more loose with my mark making, however i think this piece turned out fairly well for my first attempt at something like this. I really enjoyed the process and i feel like I've learnt something new, I am definitely going to try this again in the future to hopefully improve this skill.

UI mockup