Hi! How’s it going? How do you guys think to achieve an environment like the game Orcs Must Die? Especially the texture and the contrast of the environment. The strong color and stuff? Thank you! 
The thing to realize is that scenes like that are made by artists who have been making art for a long time. They didn’t sit at a computer for several minutes, or hours and build an environment like that. It took culmulative weeks of work and years of experience.
Notice how simple the environment actually is. There’s probably only 3-4000 polies in that scene, and the textures are probably only 512x512. It’s just skillful use of those textures and powerful use of coloured lighting. I see one big mirror surface, which can be done by use of a script, but everything else is model and texture work.
There was a great blog post I had about how beauty is not a result of lots of detail, but I can’t find the post at the moment.
Treat level-making as art rather than computer science. Knowledge of 2D art in terms of composition, shape, lighting etc. is very useful.
Consider these images:
Some are 2D art, some are 3D art. Notice that there isn’t actually much detail in them yet they are ‘breathtaking’ and ‘beautiful.’
Many people new to 3D modelling and compositing think that there is some magic button somewhere that will replace the years of dedication to art and design study… Everybody can play 2 fingers piano, but not every one sitting in front of a piano will turn out to be the next Mozart…
If you want similar cartoon-y textures from real photos, you can use GIMP to achieve something like this:
Original image (courtesy of cgtextures.com):
Steps:
- Import the image into GIMP
- Do a high-pass on the image and set its blend mode to overlay. (you can use sharpen as an alternative, but this is better for being able to tweak the image later).
- Perform a selective gaussian blur on the image layer.
Adjust to your preference.
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