The best bit of advice I got when creating any environment scene is to make sure that anything I spend time creating, especially given the time constraints, benefits the scene as a whole, compositionally and to help tell the story. This meant that I found it helpful to keep working on different elements of the scene incrementally instead of taking a single asset to completion before working on the next. Working this way allowed me to see negatives and positives in what I was creating incrementally as well as better informing my lighting, composition and everything that will ultimately make the scene successful at completion. Not to mention, it’s extremely helpful if you have a low attention span and like to constantly be varying what it is you are working on.

However, everyone works differently and one pipeline won’t suit everyone, so just tailor it to the way you work best.

Details

Detailing a scene is a constant battle especially when doing something in a more stylized fashion. I struggled at first working out exactly how far I could push my models and textures before it started to leave the style I was aiming for. As general rule of thumb, I learnt that I should try and push my textures further and then I would know where the line was. All I had to do then was bring the texture detail back a little, imply more fine detail and use whatever I was texturing at the time as a bench mark for the rest of the scene. The tricky part of this process in the current scene was that I also wanted to imply a lot of directional movement in the scene. One of the ways I thought would be cool to indicate this was within the grass texture on top of the rocks that I modeled. I lessened the detail of the grass and made it far more painterly that followed the direction that the car was going in to imply that the grass was flattened. I also knew that this texture would be less visible all around because I wanted a large contrast between the flattened and untouched environment that had been growing there far longer than the cars brief interruption of the landscape.