Where do you guy's start?

[lmbarns]

Do you start with the terrain, the roads that connect things together, sketches, or what? I'm lacking inspiration completely.


I need to make a few different environments, desert, forest, plains, and ice.

I started with this for paths in a desert city top down view but dunno...

hm1redone.png

Another thought is just a linear town in a canyon.

What do you guys do to get inspired? One of my holdups is that it's going to be for kids so I need to keep it simple but well done.

[Azélor]

I always start with the land/sea first. Then I do the land relief and waterways. Then come the details like the forest, hills, roads, cities and the rest of the stuff.

[eViLe_eAgLe]

I always start with the terrain, unless it's a manmade continent or planet. Humankinds (Unless they're like the romans, or like some of Modern society.) constructions are based around the land around them.

[lmbarns]

I think I've narrowed it down to 2 potential maps to use as a base to start from. They have all the territories I need: desert, forest, snowy mountain, and plains area.

The first the southern tip of south africa:
southafrica.jpg
southafrica1.jpg
vs.

Northwest Mongolia:
mongolia1.jpg
mongolia2.jpg

Each of these terrains consists of 25 sectors (25 3d models and 25 textures) that tile together seamlessly and are low poly enough to use on mobile. I'm going to repaint the textures of whichever map I decide to use with ground textures and populate it with 3d buildings/plants/trees/etc.