Minor Project: Investigating Samurai Environment + Colour Pallet

 The events of the animation will take place high up in the mountains, on the trail which leads to the Japanese castle. In order to begin understanding how to visually represent the surrounding mountains, I began doing research on 3D models of mountains. That is when I found the images below from the game Overwatch.

I really like the stylized look of the mountains which surround the player on the map named Nepal. I wanted to look further into how this was achieved so that I could recreate the placement of the mountains in my environment. It is done in a way where they completely surround you in the environment, while also not looking overly complicated to model and texture. This is important as my main focus is character and animation, not environment, however I still want my environment to look good. 

Below are the screenshots I took from in-game, using the floating camera in spectate mode. This allowed me to get a better look of how the mountains are arranged. I could see that the closer mountains where low poly models and as you get closer to the top, they turn into hand painted matte paintings. 

In order to understand how I could achieve this further, I looked into using heightmaps in order to create the mountain and then layer textures to get the desire effect. As I was looking for textures for the mountains on Adobe Substance Community Assets (link) , I found an array of different texture which I thought I could use for different parts of the environment. I tried to find texture which followed a similar art direction so that everything will look consistent with the world. I then applied some of the textures to the model in substance painter in order to see what they looked like. 

After showing the mountains used in Overwatch to my tutor, they suggested that I look into camera projection and provided me with a video on Gnomon (Link). I will look into this further in order to create my mountain environment.