polygonrunway
patreon
Behind the Scenes: Winter Tavern Illustration
🕑 Added 2023-01-07 14:06:12 +0000 UTC
For the first design of 2023, I wanted to something with a bit of higher quality polish, to set a bar for myself for upcoming months. Not that I won't enjoy the occasional simple designs and low poly styling, just for the first one I wanted to go all the way.
So I was naturally looking to pick something, that would fit into my series of semi-realistic stylized houses, like the arcane house or cyberpunk one. And given the start of the year and winter season, the choice fell on some kind of stylized building set in the winter environment.
I went ahead to look for some references and quickly came across some tavern design and I really loved the idea of creating a secluded cozy tavern set in a winter forest environment. Something, that would trigger a good mood and deliver a feeling of finding a warm and safe spot after a long and cold travel.
So after a long and cold 2022, welcome home.
Visit the full Pinboard here
Additionally, there is a message there for you as well. That even though a lot has been said about AI tools, that emerged in 2022, I'm still here in 2023 with the same enthusiasm and same drive to create and share my journey. A lot of designers expressed a fear for their job, or outright demotivation to continue their learning journey.
I thought about this for a while and generally, there are two types of designers when it comes to AI right now. Either they are using these tools to supercharge their creativity, or they give up on learning, because it looks like it can be all done with one prompt. There is a third group too, that think the AI prompts are now the real craft and they share their AI outputs directly. To them I can only say, good luck with your next client and his specific feedback and demands.
And the first two groups of designers make sense if you think about it. Because the fear mostly comes from a shallow understanding of the process. And I don't mean this in a bad way, not at all. I mean it simply as not enough hours given to the craft and not enough real world projects done to really see how much goes into some particular specific project.
AI cannot do this for you right now. I know, it will be perfected. But if you're there with your skills, always ready to take advantage of its capabilities, it shouldn't affect your process, only help you be more efficient.
And that's what I've done right here. I took the references I gathered and spent some time prompting the Midjourney bot for some results (if you look at the reference snapshot here, the image on the right is one of them). I saved them in my reference board alongside with the others and continued as always.
When you're creating with a goal in mind and some real intent, no AI can output a perfect result for you. But it can create nice variations, that can open your perspective and offer new possibilities, that would be hidden from you.
I took these results and used them as reference for some of the details (for example the idea for combining the tavern shield with the lantern in one place comes from one of the AI results).
But then it was business as usual. I took the H2 pencil and started sketching rough layouts in my notebook. Trying different building configurations and adding different details from different places of inspiration. This way, I was able to come up with a unique design, supercharged by multiple AI variations and ready for the Blender modeling without the fear of staring at an empty scene with a default cube.
But what will happen if they release a 3D AI tool you ask? Well, right after my sketching is done, I will launch Blender with AI addon and while modeling and blocking out, I will ask it to create a wooden beam for me. Or a lantern. Or anything that you could normally get today from any marketplace. Just faster and more tailored to your needs. Business as usual.
You can watch the process video on Youtube
