Overgrown Dungeon Process - First attempt at using 3D in my work

Over the last couple of years in particular, I’ve really tried to direct my art towards concept art and the games industry. Doing this whilst also working freelance full time has been tough, and something I’ve only been able to do in small amounts, although I feel like now I have some really big steps to take to really push my work forward and break away from some of the previous skills I’ve been known for. One area I’ve previously tried to work on, and really want to continue to learn, is 3D modelling and how I can use that combined with my 2D art. So a couple of weeks ago I set myself a task to build a very basic block out of an idea, and do a paint over in Photoshop. Very simple I know! 

Although I’m just a beginner in this, I thought it would be interesting to share my process and what I was thinking about throughout it. 

I’ve watched some basic Blender tutorials and feel fairly comfortable with it now, although I can only do very basic things, I find it quite easy to go into Blender with an idea and just have a go at building something without looking for help, which is what I did for this project. I wasn’t exactly sure of the environment I wanted to do at first, although in terms of environment art, I really love when they are done at an interesting angle. For example I love some of the environment art for games such as League of Legends and Diablo etc. where they have a sort of top down, 3D, isometric view. Approaching this as if I were an environment artist on the game, designing to the view that these kinds of games are played in was very important to me. 

So I ended up settling on a dungeon! I won’t lie, I didn’t really have much of an idea for the theme of the dungeon, but I knew I would have to at least give myself some direction or I was inevitably going to get stuck at some point. I built my block out first in Blender, I tried to gather up some reference of other dungeons in games just to get an idea of layout etc. I was also trying to think about the gameplay too, so making sure I included areas of interest and possible puzzles that the player might need to do. I wasn’t thinking about what they would be when I was building my block out, I just knew to leave space for potential ideas. I also added the lights in blender, this gave me a much better idea of how to light the scene in Photoshop. Once the very basic block out was built I took various screenshots from different angles and chose my favourite!

I actually like a few of the screenshots I took, so I’ll probably end up using those for my next environment just to get the extra practice in as this was just a trial run to see how it worked out. I ended up settling on a sort of overgrown dungeon theme and using some chests I’d designed as inspiration for the shape language. I also made sure to create a layer with my reference on which also included a list of ideas, items and moods for the overall piece, so that whenever I got stuck, I could switch this layer on and see what I was missing. Then came the painting process!

I painted probably about 90% of this in Procreate, occasionally throwing it into Photoshop to play around with gradient maps and colours. I had no plan when painting this, just always bearing in mind to work big to small. There were often times I found myself focusing on tiny details and I had to keep reminding myself that they should be worked on when everything else was right. I primarily used a soft pencil type brush for the most of this, I have a lot of painterly and chalky brushes which I tried as I know a lot of people use them in concept art, but I always end up coming back to the pencil, it was easier and quicker to use what felt right to me.

In general, throughout this process, it wasn’t so much the painting itself that I was thinking about, more than anything, I was thinking more about how to make this into an interesting layout and experience for the player. For instance I think it’s quite clear to see that the center of the room, somehow links up to the gate/door, clearly implying they need to complete something to unlock the gate, although I probably could have shown this better by not having it light up if it’s still locked for example. There’s also a chest up on the second level, with holes in the wall for a player to climb up, something that could be easily missed unless the player properly explores. I did at one point also have some heads on the wall, the idea was that they were missing their eyes, all apart from one, implying that to open the door you would need to find the other gems (eyes), although I thought it was getting a little too busy.

Overall this was a really fun and challenging experience for me and I would definitely recommend it as a starting point if you want to try incorporating more 3D into your work. I have some ideas for what I want to work on next in terms of 3D, however freelancing work looks to be pretty intense along with my lecturing job over the next few weeks, so it might be a few weeks before I can start that!

Thank you for reading guys!