Hi! My name is Kaspar and I’m working on No Truce With The Furies as a concept artist. In this short post I’m going to tell you a bit about what goes into a background. I’ll do that by elaborating on one of the screenshots from our recent press release, namely the moody one with the bad-ass car and the rain and the big building.
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I worked on that – the Perikarnassian church. It is one of the landmarks in the game and even before I began our AD Aleksander had made this early mood concept (that’s the image above).
The environment started changing during production. First, the area is newly sketched out and a rough 3D block-in of the landscape and buildings etc gets done in Blender. At this point I look at lots of references, sketch some and discuss my ideas with the writers and the AD. Eventually I end up with this:
Based on this sketch I do some variations before going into more detail and minute variations, below, along with the original idea and the rough block-in for comparison.
As you can see by the green tick – at first we went with that one. We had to press on and before I could give it to Mikk for modeling I drew up a slightly more detailed image. In this phase I tried out some colors that would fit the mood of the place. Meanwhile I got to work on the church interior. As this is something you won’t be seeing today I’ll fast forward a bit 🙂
When you compare the model to the concept you’ll see that it has gone through some changes again. The isometric perspective can be a harsh mistress. From some angles you lose detail and other angles butcher the silhouette. In Blender I went back in and made both smaller and larger modifications to the model. There, now we could basically put it in the game! It just needs materials.
Here’s the render of the church where I’ve applied base textures and tweaked the model some more – note the angle of the roof, the tower didn’t really work visually before and I attached a balcony/boardwalk to its side among other details. Now the render’s composites (the various maps our custom shaders use) went back to Rostov, who gave it a paintover.
Et Voila! Ain’t a thing. Thanks for tuning in.
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