Dev blog for the island

madanki

Here are the stages I went through to create the island image you see above, also here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Eyig7J2gKo

Full size 1920x1080 imgur album, for your pleasure:
http://imgur.com/a/Ts2ys

#1
Firstly I had the idea of an ocean against some cliffs, so I surfed around maps in the Replay system having a gander at any lush scenery I could get my hands on. I had some ideas on what maps to look at first to save time.


#2
Once I found a good starting point, in this case the rocky floor in Resort, I moved around a little trying to visualize the optimum angle and perspective for what my idea, in my head at least, required. I cut out the desired area that would give me the most flexibility in cutting, re-shaping and for general manipulation purposes.


#3
I would need more land to play with... To conquer this I grabbed a birds eye screenshot of the rocky texture. This gave me a lot of breathing space to stretch, distort, replicate, flip, rotate and so on all whilst only using one single texture.


#4
This is the result. A basic interpretation of a rocky island; trying to capture the correct perspective made all the difference in making it look realistic.


#5
Adding free greenscreen ocean video and screenshotting the background image in Resort. I then took another birds-eye screenshot of the grass texture in Resort which granted me the chance to distort its perspective and copy/ paste it onto the rocky island, adding 'Distort' effect, mixing the transparency levels and soft brush erasing in areas to give the impression of sparsely growing grass.

Taking a screenshot of the trees in Resort, with a very tight nit camera angle, I cut out the trees (which took a long long time). Copy/ pasted a few of them, changed size, rotations and orientations giving me a nice feel that I'm heading in the right direction.


#6
Cut out new trees and copy/ pasted them, again changing size and orientation. Things started to come together.


#7
Adding and copy/ pasting shrubbery all over the place. One screenshot of some flowers/ shrubbery taken from Resort.


#8
Added 'Darken' effect to shrubbery, added dark shades in the trees and surface.


#9
Added harsh fog and tree shadows as I knew were the light source was going to come from.


#10
This segment is to go under the water.


#11
It's rough but I made it, the island is nearly finished. I duplicated the green screen water onto another layer above one another, then finally added a distortion effect to the top water layer.


#12
Here it is, done! After 3 hours of editing. I added 'Rays' for the light source, smoothed out the fog, changed colour of the water and laid down some harsh transparency onto the bottom water layer; the transparency allows for a 'crystal clear' appearance and reveals the rocky segment in #10 which adds a much needed reflection of the rocky surface.