Portal to Valhalla

This scene is based on 'Valhalla' by Etienne SAVOIE, a beautiful illustration of his vision of Valhalla and it's also my entry for the Stylized Station's ArtCraft Arena Challenge #8: Legends of Valhalla.

My initial idea was to translate Etienne's work to 3D as it was, but I quickly change my mind as I started to try out different things like going for a portrait framing of the scene instead of the original landscape. That opened up the possibiliy of giving the sky more weight in the scene, which I loved, and so I followed that path, trying to 'blend' the differentent elements in the backgroud as to enhanced the overall sense of depth.

I went for a painterly look as I started to texture the different assets and set up the lighting in the scene. At first I wasn't sure in which direction I wanted to go as Etienne's rendering was less detailed that what I inteded to do for texturing but things started to click as I replaced more and more placeholders and I ended up really happy with the result.

This is my first project using programs such as Painter and Designer and also my first finished environment ever. I've been struggling to find the time to learn new software, try out new workflows and finishing my projects in general since I started to work full-time a little over a year ago so being able to finish this scene means a lot to me.

I hope l