The Creation of the Sky

This task was set during week seven and over the course of the project, a lot of changes were made to it.

The expectation: the sky should be reflective of the region that we have established. The air region is a wondrous location filled with immense beauty. The player should be impressed, and be able to feel the airiness and weightlessness of the environment. It is tranquil and home to an abundance of natural beauty.

I began the process of creating the sky by first doing a series of experiments to re-familiarise myself with digital drawing because it had really been a while.

Here is the mood board I created for how I vision the air region to look. Humid, foggy skies, mountains and Japanese architecture as Anima Mundi has significant links to Japan and the Shinto religion. The atmosphere in these examples are peaceful, ethereal and make you want to step into the picture to explore.

But first, to focus on the sky! As soon as the sky is complete, we will know how if it harmonious with the other assets in the unity scenes. It would not be time efficient to create an immensely detailed background and then it not be consistent in style or aesthetic with everything else in development.

I began the process of making the sky by first experimenting with some different gradients and seeing how I felt about the composition.

I felt as though the blues fading to orange were great as an orange sunset could cast a beautiful glow over the game. The red and purple tones I felt were not sitting right with the tone of the game. We don't want to use overly playful colours like pink and purples or dark tones like red that are more suggestive of danger and lust in colour theory. Blue however, is more representative of peace, comfort and the orange tones are suggestive of energy, happiness and stimulation.

Using some of the experiments above, I played around with adding stars, a sun and saw what I could accomplish by experimenting with line work to create waves of clouds. I did not like either of these experiments and did not think they would be appropriate for Anima Mundi, but it was part of the learning curve.

It was interesting to see how I could use different effects to get glowing stars and create a glowing effect around the sun to cast light on the rest of the scene.

Below shows the process of creating my own colour palettes, painting out the layers of the sky and blending them together to get the effect shown above.

Painting clouds did turn out to be very difficult and if I did not get the texture right it would just like smudges on the screen. I started this process by first watching some tutorial videos on youTube.

This video below was extremely helpful in showing me how I could use the airbrush tool to build up light amongst the clouds. It was clear and concise and made the process look very easy, though it was not at all.

I also watched this video because it had a really good demonstration of how to make it look like the sun was shining through the coverage of clouds and how to draw out the light as it disperses through them.

By following the tutorials I was able to make my own version of a sky with pink and peach tones. Here it is below:

I was really pleased with how this first proper sky painting turned out and I sent it into slack and we did some scene testing with it, documented in week 8 of the development diary. The issues with it were that it is too light and the colours were not most suitable for the other assets in the scene.

I decided that I needed some more critical feedback to get a clearer idea from the rest of the team for exactly what we wanted. It was difficult to provide them with a perfect arrangement as there are so many possibilities and combination of colour and composition that I was really getting lost in this process.

Here are 10 quicker experiments I made, experimenting with different ways of painting cloud forms and layers of colour within the same sky. Each experiment was made firstly by developing a custom colour palette, strategical placement of blocks of colour and then blending those colours to make suggestion so how the light is bending through the precipitation in the sky.

The first image is probably the best demonstration of how the sunset is spreading across the sky and it is my favourite composition with the lighter clouds spreading up around the moon. I also favoured the addition of the start and moon in that example.

As you can see in the examples above, I am still struggling to get an impression of the clouds but I think I need to spend some more time following the tutorials above to get a better hang of it. Luckily, I am resilient.

To get some more helpful feedback and analysis on these experiments, they were sent into the rest of the team over slack with some of the assets overlaid to compare how harmonious different arrangement were with the other work being developed.

I narrowed down the ten I had made to the five shown above, the images I thought were the best examples to share.

I personally thought the second one was the most appropriate version to suit the reset of the scene but thought it definitely was not perfect and I needed to make some more iterations. Molly preferred the first and Charisma preferred the last but did not think it was dark enough for the scene as we needed the lanterns to have a significant effect once switched on. Emilia did not think any of them were really suitable and the design definitely needed more refinement. I have spoken more about the feedback from this in the week by week documentation.

The feedback generally for these mock-ups was that the scene needed to be darker, and the team agreed that a gradient from blue to orange would be most fitting. The orange and red tones should be harmonious with the other red assets in the scene, being the bridge and lanterns.

Using this feedback I took some time to make another more refined sky painting, with a blue to orange transition and big glowing sun amongst the clouds in the bottom of the screen. Emilia also supplied me with a new mood board and a few details for clarification in the art bible.

The suggestion for the sky is that it is harmonious with the rest of the scene, but contrasts enough that the foreground is still the main focus. So the sky should not be too overwhelming in vibrance and detail. The art bible contained a lot of different coloured skies so I stuck to the initial plan of creating a blue to orange transition.

This is the penultimate version completed:

The version I created is the first image and the proceeding images are the same painting with a rose, white and grey filter applied respectively, to attempt to bring down the vibrance that was not so noticeable during the process.

The feedback for this version was that it was too vibrant for the scene, a little overwhelming in colour but the composition was great. Therefore I just need to make one final refinement where I make this painting a little darker with some more red tones to suit the assets in the scene.

Above are tests I did myself and shared with the team. It is clear that the sky needs to be toned down in vibrance and made quite a bit darker. I can add red tones the same as the lanterns into the sunset to help draw it all together.

Here is the final version completed after this feedback, and a how it looks inside the Unity scene:

This was a really long process that took place over at least 4 weeks because for a lot of it I wan unwell and I also had to keep up with the unity project development. However, I am glad that I persevered and got it done because I think the final outcome is really successful. It harmonises with the assets in the scene and draws it all together without stealing focus from the foreground. And when the lanterns are lit there will be a visible effect on how the light will change the scene.