Suramar Blacksmith

My fourth assignment for Ashleigh Warner's class on CGMA "Creating Stylized Game Assets" ( https://www.cgmasteracademy.com/courses/143-creating-stylized-game-assets)

https://www.artstation.com/ashdoodles

The assignment was fairly open ended, we were to create an environment/diorama, ideally with a specific game or style in mind. The environment was supposed to contain certain types of assets, something with alpha, a plant, tileable textures etc. but the requirements were flexible depending on the type of scene. We had 5 weeks to complete the assignment, one week purely for concepting and the rest for 3D progress, with checkpoints at each week, and a final critique we could apply post-class.

I chose to make a scene that drew on Suramar and the Nightborne from World of Warcraft for inspiration. I've always loved blacksmith imagery, my great grandfather was a village blacksmith, and I realized that, for all the time I had spent in Suramar, I couldn't remember seeing a blacksmith's workshop. So I wanted to try and create a forge scene that still retained the elegance of the Nightborne aesthetic, I came to the idea that most of the work is accomplished via magic using a "rune forge" and then is refined with delicate tools to etch runes and patterned designs.

The immediate scene of the workshop sits at around 14k tris, while the full scene is closer to 50k due to the towers in the backdrop being duplicated many times over. The scene uses a mix of tiling and unique textures with most of the props in the immediate scene using unique one-for-one textures. Everything is handpainted from scratch and uses only diffuse, emissive and opacity maps. Most maps are painted at 1024 or 2048 resolution and then sized down where applicable. Rendering is done in Marmoset and takes advantage of GI, Fog, and a slight Fresnel effect among other settings and lighting.