I then took elements of my two favourite thumbnails, combining the castle from one and the composition and rock from another.
Then I went into Zbrush and created rough land formations using broad and unprecise strokes. The result was a couple of interesting rock shapes, that I then remeshed and imported into 3Ds Max.
ZBrush land forming
Making the building assets
Land editing in 3Ds Max
I played around with composing two pointed pieces of rock, but after experimenting with elongating one of the rocks I decided to just keep that one, which was truer to my final thumbnail drawing. I continued to block out my concept by creating castle towers and small buildings. I was inspired heavily by a tattoo artist called Castlebasas, who uses tall grand towers in his designs. I wanted to integrate this feeling of height and grandeur into my work. I also created a bridge inspired by concepts from Destiny and Thor. I liked the idea of having a long delicate piece of suspended architecture leading away from the castle, which also serves to bring your eye off of the screen.
Castlebasas' designs
Bifrost bridge from 'Thor'
Destiny bridge concept
Once my asset blocking had been completed, I played around with compositions. Some of my compositions were too low down, which left not much room for the cloud coverage I wanted. Therefore I tried different angles, and settled with a side-on composition that placed the castle and bridge higher up along the format. I was satisfied with this composition as it gave the sense of extreme height that I wanted and left room for areas of interest to be placed underneath.
The next stages I found challenging - creating render passes and bumpmaps. I went onto HDR Haven to find a suitable environment for ambient lighting. I found an environment made from images of the sun through the clouds at the top of a cliff. This suited the mood I was trying to achieve well, and so I saved it and placed it into a standard material. I applied standard materials to all of my objects in the scene at the same time, and use the Environment and Effects tab to edit my lighting settings. I set up a perspective camera to help me save the view I wanted to render.
HDRI sky I used
I then did some render passes, using Z depth. I took two main renders using different render engines as they gave different levels of detail and contrast. I preferred the render made from the ART renderer rather than the Quicksilver renderer as it retained the level of detail that I wanted from the forms of the land, and was not too contrasted. I also took some renders of lighting coming from the left and right hand side of the scene, and saved both as bumpmaps.
Using Quicksilver renderer
Using ART renderer
Lighting from the left
Lighting from the right
I also did a clown map so that my masking in photoshop would be a lot easier. I plugged in three different material colours for the bridge, castle and rock and made them entirely flat coloured. I rendered this and then tweaked my settings for the Z Depth, so that I could get a strong sense of distance with my concept.

Clown Map
Z Depth
Once the rendering was all complete, I opened up my renders into photoshop and began setting up the lighting using masks, using the clown map. I opted for a warm bright pale yellow on the left side and a cooler blue tone on the right. To me this would match the mood that I was trying to set for the scene - mysterious, bright and awesome. Then I brought in photos from google images, using a filter to receive images that could be manipulated into my own. I layered different cloud images, experimenting with layer effects a lot. I received a variety of unintentional yet really striking effects.
Layering clouds
Unintentional hellish purple sky
I layered photos for the rock and for the bridge, playing around with images of cliff rocks and effects once again, and at first using silver engraving, but then opting for a less noisy plain piece of silver photobashed and blended onto the bridge.
Finally I added extra objects such as birds flying and cloud in the foreground, before using the Camera Raw filter to enhance the final concept. I reduced the clarity to make the castle appear to be glistening in the distance, almost like an oasis in the sky. I also altered other elements such as the temperature, contrast and tint.
As a final step I tweaked the composition very slightly until I was satisfied. Overall I am very pleased with the outcome. I learnt a huge amount from the rendering process, and I fell that I could do the entire project again much faster next time.
Action plan for improvements:
I would improve the amount of texture for the rock in Zbrush as it was a bit too smooth in my render, and I would make the photobashing on the bridge a bit clearer as it looks too hand-painted.
I could also add something in the foreground for more depth and distance. I could also maybe add in some person sized silhouettes for the idea of scale in the foreground.
Ivan Selvic is a concept artist I found who uses the 3D render pass workflow. He also uses large scale buildings and environment aspects and scales them against much smaller silhouettes to exaggerate the idea of scale. This is something I could try and do to improve the impact of my work.
Ivan Selvic's 'Ancient Graveyard'
3D Model base done in Zbrush
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