Behind the Scenes: Spooky House Island (Patreon)

Oh the time flies. But we still have few days until the month of spookiness concludes, so naturally I wanted to give this few more shots. For two consecutive years now, I made some version of a haunted house in October, so it was time for the third one.

I already had some style preference in mind. The first I made was low poly, last year I made a textured semi-realistic diorama and this time I wanted to make more complete scene while applying style seen in my recent works.

That means partial texture use and procedural materials, strong stylization and exaggerated distorted proportions. And to make the scene less cut-out of a context, I wanted to create a floating island to make it feel complete. And, of course, perspective camera!

Visit the full Pinboard here

I dove right into the Google image search and Pinterest and built a board with useful ideas and mood shots. There are always two types of images I look for. Ones, that might be quite different from what I want to create, but have some quality I want to achieve, like certain visual effect or overall lighting mood.

The other ones have specific details I want to include. With these, I often crop out the distinct objects or details to reduce the noise and make sure I will remember them. (Like the bats, that I cropped, used as an idea for my sketch and then completely forgot about when modeling the scene 🤦‍♂️)

I load everything important into PureRef and then organize to make sure I have everything I want. By organizing I mean cropping, moving around and grouping and even resizing to make some of them larger and give them importance.

I started my sketch (again, cheating with iPad) by roughly drawing the island shape and its structure. I really liked one hand-painted example with the island made out of these clumps of rock, so I sketched it out in a similar way.

Then of course - the house. Since these two elements define the overall perceived shape of the composition, I wanted to make sure it feels balanced. I tried several shapes until landing on a classic shape with tower and even small appended rounded alcove on top.

After that, it was mostly about finding a good placement for other details, so they can balance out the composition and make the whole thing pleasing to look at. That's why you can find moon with the clouds and the spooky tree on opposite sides diagonally and to leave some breathing room around them, other details kind of grow out of the terrain.

You can watch the process video on Youtube.