VALVE / LOST COSMONAUTS
VALVE corporation
3D ENVIRONMENT – 2D MATTE PAINTING
In collaboration with Lost Cosmonauts we took part in the creation of the environments & matte paintings for this Crownfall debut page of Vengeful and Skywarth. Digging further on the Dota 2 world was amazing and we really enjoyed working with the creative team at Valve and come up with solutions to bring these backgrounds to life.
With so much existing material, it was first very important to fully understand the existing visual pillars of the Dota 2 universe and its uniqueness.
We started on the Vengeful and Skywarth Debut with an existing concept provided by Valve. Originally the idea was to start the build of the environment from scratch and create a highly detailed painting version of the concept art with 3 distinct moods. One for each character and 1 for the animated debut sequence.
Looking at the painterly quality of the concept we opted for a different approach. We reprojected and photomodel from the concept art directly. To do this we had to neutralize the lighting on the artwork to use it as a base albedo pass for the 3D environment. We also had to cut these into layers to project the architecture elements separately. This let us preserve as much of the look as possible and also let us iterate on 3 different lighting scenarios simultaneously while staying true to the artwork.
Each character needed its own mood and colors to showcase its personality. Based on a grade done on the original concept art provided by Valve, we created 3 distinct light rigs to replicated each mood. Reprojecting and building this landscape in Blender was the most flexible and efficient approach to get to the right painterly look but still be able to reuse most of the content across all 3 moods.
