The Making of a Forest (Patreon)

Just wanted to take a moment to give an update on the modular forest "walls" I've been working on. You can check out my previous progress/process update here (near the end of that post).

So after some more exploration I've landed on something close to this:

This is a mockup of the 6"x1" wall segment. It's made up for a few different layers to give it a bit of implied depth and to allow me to move things around and efficiently create some variation in the wall pieces. Colors are just place holders at the moment.

Here's a quick and dirty break out of the pieces I have currently that were used to make up the above wall segment.

Similar to my previous iteration I'm working with background, midground, and foreground elements. The big change is I've moved away from trying to build in an atmospheric background plane (it was just to unwieldy when it came to cutting out the silhouette) and I've added a bunch of smaller art assets (rocks, logs, small trees, etc) that I can mix-n-match to create the foreground and add variation.  Similarly I kept the trunks separate from the pine portion of the trees so I could rearrange the pine needle portions to add just that much more variety.

Additionally by keeping the trunks separate it's my hope I can recycle the elements in the future to create some desolate and/or burned forest walls.

Here's a quick mock up of a few wall segments with slight variations that were created from these elements.

It's nothing too crazy, and these mockups don't include any color variation yet, but it's my hope I should be able to provide some forest wall segments that have enough visual variety that they won't feel clone stamped when you're building encounters on the tabletop with them.

I hope you enjoyed this little update, alright, back into the woods I go :D

-Marshall