some very early research and environment practice

For the environments it will be important to consider how much of a leftover influence that human architecture has in the landscape, I want it to be barely noticeable, as if the left over rubble and spires from human buildings could almost be mistaken for natural rock formations to the animals and bonobos there now.

I wanted to consider how the earth may get to that state of almost completely covering our architecture, I considered the law of superposition, which is used to identify the age of sediment, the lower you go the more ancient the sediment. I have yet to look into in detail but I will try to look into whether this is a potential way in which the human buildings will have been buried and if so how long it would take/how far in the future the game would need to be set then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SEUtahStrat.JPG

A personal observation and peeve of mine is that Futuristic films and games seem to assume that in the future all architecture will be 'futuristic' whereas the more likely scenario would be that the architecture from today would largely remain but with the futuristic buildings in addition/replace some old buildings, so I don't necessarily want the peaking buildings in the ground to look particularly futuristic, perhaps some will but for now I will probably have modern and old style buildings, or cathedrals, as they are large and have a potentially nice aesthetic.

On this page I was exploring how this design may actually play into the game and environment design, for example a protruding church spire may have a hole leading into the ancient interior where some tribe of bonobos may live. I also looked at just how a an area of skyscrapers like manhattan may create a large hills with the buildings just peaking out of the top.

Another thing that was important to me was that the landscape wasn't a typical post apocalyptic brown and grey wasteland, so far in the future a new ecosystem is flourishing so I want it to look like a young earth from before humans started colonising and building cities/destroying ecosystems, Only with that small hint of humanity peaking through the sediment from place to place.

Here I am exploring that idea with really rich and lush natural colours in the hills, it's boring and not very detailed yet but I just wanted to establish and capture that freshness. This was also a practice piece and an experimentation with a variation of a painting method I learnt (but never used) but Feng Zhu (concept artists/lecturer and FZD School)

What Feng Zhu does in some images to set up a colour scheme and 'texture' for the painting is that he takes a photo graph and pastes it sporadically over the page leaving no canvas, and then uses that as a base for his painting. To get me started I just took a screenshot from the game 'Flower' as I knew it would have that rich colour I was looking for and painted over it while colour picking, as I was just painting over the whole image I didn't want to leave any in the background so I painted over the entire thing.

http://venturebeat.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/flower-game-5.jpg

I didn't really like this method too much but it did work, as I usually have trouble getting started with my colours in landscape painting, I am going to try a few other methods too now though like just creating a unique composition using a reference, a technique called photobashing, and on top of that some general studies too, starting with value as I feel that that is affecting my ability to pick colours too.