Research

Well Iv spent time over the past few days gathering my research from the Norfolk broads and also source some other material.
Next week we are to go in and see Chris for his input into our ideas for the final major project. As I had 1000's of photos of the broads and the Anglo-Saxon village I produced a couple of moodboards for a general overview. I have also been producing a design document from the start going through my ideas in hope to reach a conclusion.

As an initial idea even though I have good research I imagine it looking rather plain and uninteresting. I did have an idea to have a little market area in the middle of the settlement to reinforce the human element and also have something more interesting than just grass. The time era for this project Im still not 100% sure about, even though that West Stow country park I looked at screams Anglo-Saxon - although its interesting I think it may have to be updated so from that as from information I took the Anglo-Saxon villages were as plain as they looked.

I decided to look at games such as Assassins Creed and Fable as they have a strong connection with towns folk and also about the era I was thinking about capturing. I did a couple of moodboards from screenshots in game in attempt to keeping an open mind as to what to do.
Surprisingly in the whole game there are only about 4 variations of market stands and they are repeated, I didn't notice this before.

Slightly different environments In this game where I found this research
but it was the assets I was looking at and not the lighting as such.

In this game there are large city areas so some elements may not be suitable for that small settlement I was thinking of for my FMP. Generally there 4 types of market stands in this game are carpets, fruit, fish monger, and decorative plates.
As im thinking more small settlement/town perhaps this needs to be evaluated.


Following on from that Ill do a few experimental concepts and see where that takes me.Next ill look at Fable,
after spending about 10 minutes running around the first bit I was surprised how basic this game was in terms of modelling. I stopped playing after the first section as it wasn't really what I wanted. Fable II may have more of what I wanted as at the start it had more of a town feel where its more likely to find market stalls.
I cant say iv played this game very much but i'd forgotten how nice the environments looked. The first part of the main game gives you this lake side area with a day/night setup which rotates – not sure the duration in-between. This was the sort of thing I was thinking of actually, obviously there arn't that many man made buildings in this section but the general feel is quite nice.
The water has animated ripples with also some form of distortion shader of the reflections. There is a lot of greenery in this section and its quite vibrant – the sort of vibrancy you found on that holiday to the broads.