For my 4th year honours project I decided to expand upon a personal project that I had been developing for a number of years. Over the course of my time playing table top role playing games I have been developing my own version of a fantasy setting that a game like Dungeons and Dragons could be played in. For this project I decided to create a guidebook to a section of the world that would feature several different locations, creatures and peoples. The title of the project is “The World of Senaretth: Storms, Snow and Seas”.
To begin the development of my project I made use of the Inktober Challenge from 2021 to produce ink sketches each day of October to rapidly develop basic visuals for the project. Each drawing I produced for that challenge can be found in previous posts. Having created these sketches I used them to begin to develop the visuals which would go into my guide book. I did this by breaking down each drawing and reconsidering the elements of each design in order to refine them into a finished piece which could be used in the project.
In the example above I began with the ink sketch and moved on to black and white composition thumbnails, after this I moved on to developing the design of the buildings in the scene.
I then tried producing the same concept in 3D as that would allow me to rapidly change the camera position, lighting and overall scene composition.
Using this method I was able to create an appropriate composition for each environment before creating a fully rendered painting for each one.
For each creature or character design I created a sheet where I redeveloped each design and attempted to fix any design issues found in each. Having done that I moved on to creating more fully developed final pieces for each design so they could be organised into my guidebook.
This project has been extremely informative. I have developed several skills in terms of character, creature and environment design as well as improving my overall understanding of both 2D and 3D software. I have been able to share my work with my peers and lecturers and have received invaluable feedback which has allowed me to more fully explore this project and produce some of the most interesting work I have ever developed.
The development document I created detailing my process for each piece that went into this project can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m8XDln28E2De_BPGzKGi8A82dfIXyL4G/view?usp=sharing
The final project itself can be found here complete with written accompaniment for all nineteen pages: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zR6ngpE5S1H1AuqF0NFp6uR-FcteWRlG/view?usp=sharing