Behind The Scenes: Wizarding World

Oh, that time of the year again. Nights get longer and what better way to spend a cold misty evening, than get cozy in front of the TV, re-watching the HP saga once again. It kinda became a tradition in our household, so it's natural it bleeds into my work as well.

I have already done a few low poly HP dioramas back in the day, so I was looking for a way to create something new. The first thing that came to mind was a semi-realistic rework of some of those scenes (incoming!), but to be honest, I'm holding a little bit of grudge towards the Adobe Substance addon, which failed miserably in my last project and I wasn't able to recover the texturing work done.

I almost started to work on a "best of" movies mashup illustration, when it struck me. I can dedicate the whole mashup to one universe! Oh, this series is getting interesting, Avengers beware!

Visit the full Pinboard here

I went ahead and started to look for some interesting references and snapshots from the movies and the universe as a whole. This time I left out the illustration references, because the style was pretty much defined by the series, so I only needed a pool of ideas.

I wasn't keen on getting all the details in. I just wanted a nice balance of environments and situations to cover at least few movies, so it's apparent that this is about the universe as a whole.

Also, I needed some vibrant colors, so the things that made the list were details like orange Weasley shop, purple Knight Bus and so on.

This kind of compilation definitely requires some planning and jumping right into the 3D software could end up in unfinished blob of a work. So the sketch is really an essential tool to strategically block out the environment and basically think out loud. 

I decided on the multilevel layout, because if the illustration would be on the flat plane, some things in the front would obscure the others behind. Also, this is the time you can consolidate your references and decide, which environments will be actively part of the terrain assets (like the bridge for example) and which will be the filler assets and buildings.

Of course, when building in 3D, you come to a point, where you need to make compromise if something doesn't work like you imagined (for example the train would be in conflict with the tree and the car). But I can't imagine making this effectively without a planning and a sketch phase.

You can watch the process video on Youtube