This year I put my skills towards the Blizzard Student art contest. I decided to go with a scene of one of my favorite races, the Ethereals. This was a somewhat interesting challenge since as a race, they don't have any structures of their own, they simply take over old and abandoned structures left over by others, or they just set up shop where they need to with there tech. It in this case that I decided to create a Night Elf based tower that has been 'reclaimed,' by the Ethereals instead. Since they're always looking for a way to gather more magical artifacts and to make a quick gold, I also wanted to show them reaping the land, from harvesting trees to mining into the earth itself. Overall, the project was very fun and I'm satisfied with what I ended up with.
As for the gallery, it starts off with my starting concepts, a tower I used as inspiration and screen shots I took to use a guide while making all the props and textures. Next are two simple concept pieces I painted as I finalized my design. After that, I have two different shots. The first was my first placement of the tower and props, and with the help and suggestions from my peers, I moved everything in closer for a tighter and well fit scene. I also included my first base color texture, just to see how the colors looked and felt in the scene. After that, I started my fine detail of texture painting, getting into making the props actually look like what they were supposed to. And at last, I have the final product, with all accompanying textures.
For the technical stuff, modeling everything took around seven hours, texturing was around twelve hours, and everything else from rearranging props, creating the lighting, and other small details was another three hours. The only thing I forgot to time myself on was painting my concept piece, which I would estimate around 10-15 hours to finish. So a grand total of around 36 hours for this whole project. The final poly count is 27536 and I used two 512 textures, both with corresponding alphas.
