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Behind the Scenes: Blacksmith House Illustration
🕑 Added 2024-04-15 18:06:06 +0000 UTC
I wanted to continue my latest game asset series with the focus on builder and management game themes, so for the next one I picked rather standard thing - the blacksmith.
What kind of settlement would you get by without a proper smithy. No matter if you need to plow your field or impale someone, there needs to be a furnace around.
I went ahead and searched for references to save to my Pinboard. I was mostly searching for stylized game assets, prefferably 2D painted to avoid any style bias and focus only on content.
Visit the full Pinboard here
I saved all the references to PureRef, cool reference software that allows you to place, scale and crop images and organize them on a board. This helps me to comb through the details much better and create a palette of ideas I'd like to mix into the final result.
I was focusing on different combinations of house styles and outdoor elements and then saving aside interesting details, like iron ingots tools, weapons, lanterns, etc. As I mentioned, I like to organize these into detail palettes, because I remember countless moments when I found something cool I liked only to forget to include it in the final design.
The final step when preparing for 3D modeling is the sketch. It allows me to explore multiple ideas and combinations in quick turnarounds, without the need to fully commit. I started exploring the layout possibilities and I was mostly focusing on how to combine three main elements. The house, furnace and the outdoor shed.
The main challenge was to organize those in a way, that allows to see both angles of the house and keep the visibility of the furnace under the shed.
It took few tries, but finally I landed on design, that put the furnace and the chimney more in the background, while still keeping it visible and recognizable, leaving some space for the other tools and anvil.
This time, I wanted a more natural feeling out of the scene, so I placed everything on more organic shaped island, instead of square diorama.
You can watch the process video on Youtube.
