Story

Everything has a story, in one form or another. With props, I can tell it through modeling and texturing. In a scene as a whole, I can tell it with object placement and lighting. This place had its own story as well, and I wanted to push it even further, but it just wasn’t possible at this time. I wanted the viewer to be drawn to the front of the general store. I wanted them to notice the blood trail going from the front door and eventually disappearing in the mud. The pillar on the left has blood stains as well. The window is shattered. The bucket with oranges is kicked over and they all scattered across the ground. Did somebody run away? I wanted them to ask themselves – „What happened behind the walls of this place?“ – and to feel a need to find the answers.

Challenges of the Art Direction

From the total of 4 weeks I spent working on this project, the last week solely consisted of tweaking the lighting and the post-processing. In these situations, it can be easy to fall into a never-ending cycle, and I have to admit I was a victim of it as well. I ended up with 300+ screenshots depicting various changes in things like color temperatures, fog density, the contrast of the shadows, the strength of an AO etc. I constantly compared them and tried to figure out which one is better, but it seemed like there is no end to it. Like in other art disciplines as well, spending too much time with it tends to weaken your senses and bad choices can be made. A few times I made the image worse, burning half of the details in the process, while in my mind it looked like an amazing improvement just because I was so used to and bored with the current version, so anything different looked better. That is why it is important to make regular breaks so the brain can rest a bit, be it about visual art, music production, writing, programming or anything else.

At times like these, feedback from other people is incredibly useful. Everyone should try being active in some internet communities and not be afraid of posting their work to be judged. Only recently have I started joining some Discord communities and the experience so far was invaluable. DiNusty Empire and 3D Modeling stood out as great places to learn from and talk with like-minded people.

As I have mentioned in the beginning, the scene looked different in the first week of the project. I realized that if this was the only building I was going to make in this setting, why wouldn’t I celebrate its architecture more? I didn’t use many of the recognized shapes in the original version. The other problem was that material-wise, it was just too boring. Almost everything was brown and that meant nothing stood out. It was time to turn everything upside down – I boosted the saturation and the lighting, I started brightening everything. The walls became colorful – green, yellow, red, blue. Eventually, I stuck with the blue one and from that point on, the direction changed drastically. I went for the color palette which consisted of blue, white and gold tones. I avoided the red color in props on purpose so the blood could be the only red part of the scene. This is how the scene looked like before those changes: