Ascendant:Infinity - Alien forest environment design
I was tasked with tackling the vegetation and flora of the world in the early development of Ascendant:Infinity.
Most of this work was blue-sky exploration into finding some unique ways to make the transformed forest of earth in the far future feel alien and unique.
I also used this opportunity to play around a bit with using Zbrush and painting together to generate designs.
The result of the first iteration of the forests, with alternate colour schemes.
Initial ideation sketches for the forests. The goals was to get some ideas to start building out and expanding on.
At this stage we went with the idea of parasitic fungal tendrils making up the main "trees" in the world, and we did some investigation on the overall integration and the canopies.
Gameplay sketches were also made to make sense on how we would use and build these with gameplay in mind, since having clear volumes and cover was important to keep the play experience smooth.
After an art direction change the forest became much more familiar, but the idea of the fungal growth was kept. Instead it morphed into being an additional layer creeping up other vegetation. Similar explanatory sketches were done for this new pass.