To test out some of my previous concepts for our environment I took a rendered screenshot of my character in the our base environment and lit by the sky dome light we’ll be using into Procreate to test some ideas based around it.
I came up with the above image through various tests and with the approval of the group I went ahead and developed an image that we could use as a background, taking into account the tests and concepts I’d done, the style of our characters and environment as well as all the references and influences I had found.
Keeping in mind lessons on appeal and shape design from last semester, and some personal learning on similar subjects, as well as the other aspects mentioned above, I’m pleased with what I came up with here.
To bring this background into our environment I first tried using a free image plane, but finding out that it didn’t render after some quick tests I tried scaling a polygon plane to the size of the image plane and applying the painting as a texture.
This worked, but annoyingly it appeared very dark in the render view. My first solution to this was to bring into the scene an area light at a high intensity (1000000 to be exact) to see if it was because the plane was in shadow.
I was very happy that this solution had worked, but Alec pointed out to me that if I used an aiFlat material on the plane it would be unaffected by the blazing sun of our skydome, so I tried it and of course it worked. Much handier than having extra lights in the scene that would up the file size and make moving the backgrounds awkward.
Below is how our environment looks from above, with four planes with the same background (all of different scales and positions to avoid complete repetition) encircling our arena.
