This is a render to see how the lighting works, aswell as the new arrangement of the buildings, which I was pleased with.

An early playblast to get an idea of how the short clip will work. The original idea was to have the camera moving down while looking up as it creates an ominous feeling and also hides the floor which isn't there. Even at this early stage I saw that this idea worked really well with the atmosphere I was trying to create with this scene.

To fit the mood of the environment I decided the weather should be overcast with perhaps a sprinkling or snow/rain. Above is a quick matte painting for the backdrop, and above that is a frame from the final render showing it in action with some snow effects from maya.

For my next environment I am going to do a village/town in which a lot of the plotline of my game takes place. As the story is fairly dark and focuses around death and delerium, I felt this town needed to really look gritty and dank to reflect the mood of the narrative.

Using the same process as my forest, I found this time around I was able to throw it all together much quicker.

This is the final render with all the tweaks and adjustments. Ofcourse there is still more I could do and experiment with, like changing the cameras focal length to blur out more distant objects. I may go back to this scene after deadline and continue to play around with it, and perhaps make some more compositions out of the assets I created.

A very short render to test how the shadows mapped to the spotlights would react with the fog, which turned out better than I hoped. Just a little more tweaking with the lights and I think its just about there.