My family and I have been playing Catan a lot and I thought it would be fun to visualize what the game pieces would look like in 3d. This was also a great excuse to practice working on environments. All of the tiles were created initially using the built in A.N.T Landscapes plugin and then I sculpted additional detail. Textures were a blend of procedural and some content from Quixel.
A lot of the vegetation are planes which would not translate well. I suppose if you were good at miniatures you could add that detail back in but you would probably be better off printing a stylized version. Would be fun to see these as game pieces though.
It wasn’t too bad actually. At 4k resolution all of the renders took about 30-40 minutes at 256 samples and Optix denoising. The combined piece took the longest at 4 hours as it ran over my video card ram so I had to use CPU rendering .
You could make a complete board by doing isometric (orthographic) rendering of each piece with film transparency and then placing the hex-pieces over the ocean backdrop in Photoshop or Gimp.
Wonderful. You might consider making the individual tiles a bit more colorful as Michael’s original illustrations are a bit more colorful as well. That might help to distinguish them a bit better. And maybe make the mountains a tad more greyish - especially towards the peaks. Otherwise this is really nice.
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