For a while we’d been discussing how to translate iconic western American landscapes into a 3D style that would suit our short. I’d come up with some concepts based around places like Monument Valley in Utah and the Arizona Desert (as made famous by John Ford’s westerns)-
-but when we started to think more realistically how we might create an appropriate and good-looking environment it was clear enough that we’d need to veer away to at least some extent from our bigger and grander ideas since we probably wouldn’t have the time to create something so full and detailed. Plus, we knew we were going to be using 2D matte paintings as our background which would bring the impression of a bigger and more detailed environment overall.
To test out an idea Liam tried adding subdivisions to a polygon plane, scaling it up and extruding faces with a degree of randomness around the edges to create the effect of terrain and landforms. For a first test this worked quite well and we ended up using it as a base for our environment.
We’d thought, too, about creating our own textures or painting them for everything in the scene to better unify the style and although I don’t think this will come through in the end, we’ve applied it to our environment; taking a UV snapshot of the plane Liam created into photoshop I spent some time painting a texture over it, using a gradient of a pinkish-orange around the edges to a warm, light yellow in the centre (thinking about how it should compliment the bright blue of a sky) alongside some brushes from Kyle’s Dry Media brush pack to create more texture and visual interest.
The above image is the final result.
In applying and rendering the texture with the sky dome we’d elected to use we found it to work surprisingly well. Hopefully as we further our environment and give it some more context it’ll start to look less alien than it does here.