Behind The Scenes: Diablo Camp (Patreon)

There is not much to say about inspiration and creative process behind this piece, so I decided to share more practical tips from Blender.

Diablo 2 Resurrected is released today and since I love the game, I wanted to create a tribute. Only creative thing I did, was to decide which part of the game I want to recreate. Everyone's first contact with the game is in the Rogue camp and I think it's simple enough and iconic at the same time, to make it recognizable.

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I looked up few images as style and mood reference and got to sketching. I had to compress the camp scene on a square diorama in a way that would work, and that would show all the key parts like cart, chest and the campfire.

I made the campfire smaller and closer to the rest of the scene and pushed everything closer to the stonewall. Of course, I had to reduce the number of some details, but all in all, it still looked like the scene from the game, only more compact.

I wanted to get as close to the game's look as possible while still keeping it in lane with my style. That meant a lot of texturing work and some realistic foliage. Below, you can find a solid view of the scene and if you inspect it, you can see there is not that much going on.

I just modeled the shapes of some object in their most primitive version and left all of the heavy lifting to textures. But I didn't have a time to bring the scene into Substance Painter and do really custom texturing work, so I helped myself with few techniques.

First, displacement is your friend. If you look at the stonewall, it's just a simple structure. I only made sure its made out of similar sized squares and used adaptive subdivision (found in subdivision modifier after you enable experimental features in cycles render settings). After that, you can use the height map from the material to create a surface details. Easy and quick.

The next thing I did, is to use some game texturing techniques to quickly add details to certain parts. For example the iron rings on the barrel. You can select just partial mesh on the model and unwrap it (even without adding seams). After that you can convert it to UV strip (you can do it manually by snapping, or use some addon, like UV Squares). After that, you just position and scale the UV strip on the texture, picking the part of it you need for the model. 

The best way to see it in action and understand is to look at the texturing part of the process in YT video (link below).

Regarding the foliage, I love to use Botaniq addon for realistic grass and trees. There's really not much to say about it. It has everything you need and really great set of tools to help you with particle distribution of the grass, and realistic looking trees for every season of the year.

This ways, I was able to create detailed and semi-realistic work in shortest time possible and still get great results. 

You can watch the process video on Youtube