First Blog Entry of the Year

It's been quite a while since I made a post, I never really had much of an opportunity to do anything over most of the Christmas break because of all the celebrating and after that I was on cooldown from all the celebrating. But really, I have no excuse.

However, during that crazy time I did manage to sneak in some work for my dissertation.

Stalagmites

Before the Winter vacation, or a week in(there was so much going on I really can't remember what happened when) started I drew up a lot of stalagmites  The darker ones are the ones on the top-most foreground layer, they are darker than the other ones because they are further in the cave, and they are smaller because otherwise they would get in the way of the players view. I added a lighter border to each of the stalagmites because of the light shining through the holes in the cave and hitting the stalagmites, and where there is less light I made it darker, perhaps I'll go back to these and make it more obvious by creating a harder contrast with darker/lighter colours for now however it's fine.

The bigger stalagmites are closer to the light source so they're brighter.

I pretty much did the same thing with the Stalagtites.

The other of my assets were bats hanging down from the ceiling.

Those are the two key frames for the bat, it's animation would go from sleeping in the first frame position to opening it's wings and flapping them around for a little bit before closing them up again... And that's the bat, not really much to say for it apart from it is super hard to animate it's wings unfolding.

Really, I've added a lot of layers that I haven't really said anything about unfortunately. Sometimes halfway through the winter break my background looked something like this;

I added the path which the player would walk on if this was in a game, I tried to make the path guide the players' eye through the holes using the curves of the path, and then the gap where the big hole is would really draw the eye to the big light house that would stand there. For some added detail I put on some rocks around and underneath the path archs. I tried to keep the path itself clean because of how much I value simplicity.

Speaking of the lighthouse...

I made the lighthouse on a lone island in the distance on a grassy knoll, I think it would be a bit silly to add too much detail to an item in the distant back, so I didn't. There shouldn't be any loose blades of grass or much detail on the rock, the lighthouse however can afford to have some faded paint touches.

Perhaps I'll go back to this next week to change/add some lighting to the rocks because I have messed up hard on the light here.

This asset is helpful because it helps me establish a light source for the whole background, the light is coming from the right, the lighthouse itself is not the light source.

This is the iteration of the background from a week or two ago(I think), as you can see I changed the water from generic wave stuff to more smooth waves, the waves are tweened to look like they're, well... Waving. As they wave they reveal the Lighthouse island more.

That's it for now I guess, this is probably the only retrospective blog I'll do, I hope. Now I'm off to recover from this terrible cold that just won't go away.