Hello, I’m Ryan an environment artist on the Neverwinter team. You might remember some of my previous work such as Vizeran’s Tower and Old Dragons Lair from The Maze Engine. In my previous blog, I talked about the overall process of what goes into creating an environment from concept to final ship. For this post I’d like to laser focus a bit more on one aspect of environment art: world building. World building is the process of creating the game world from terrain sculpting, terrain texture painting, and prop set dressing.

Lonelywood is a very specific area in the D&D world so it had to meet certain specifics but within those parameters I was pretty free to creatively explore and create.

Here are some screenshots of the Lonelywood zone. This is only a small glimpse of the zone.

Now I’ve done a lot of telling so far so now I’d like to show you how an environment artist might go about world building and set dressing an area. If you’ve ever watched Bob Ross paint that’s basically how world building works for me. The video above shows my environment world building process. The first part of the video shows brief examples of the terrain sculpt and paint tools. From there I go on to build a small environment scene.

• Ryan Dao

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