This scene’s inspiration was capturing the whimsical fantasy style of games like Runescape, Magicka, and World of Warcraft. I sketched this initial concept art in Photoshop to plan my composition and colour palette.
I created this scene in 2015, so tools like the Photoshop Quixel plug-in, Substance Painter, and Designer hadn’t yet become industry standards. Because of that, I made all of my textures in Photoshop and zBrush, with CrazyBump and Xnormal for converting height maps to normals and baking curvature, AO, and world-normal masks. When I finally discovered Substance in 2016, it changed my workflow completely, and I’ve made it a point ever since then to stay on top of industry trends and new techniques; learning everything from World Machine and Speed Tree to photogrammetry and 3d scanning software such as Agisoft and Artec Studio. I think that learning to texture with this workflow, enabled me to develop a much more in-depth understanding and rationale for the techniques used in Substance Painter and Designer.
