Intro

This page details and examines the creation of one of my projects called “Apexis Mage Tower”. The artwork is a World of Warcraft styled diorama.

The page examines all aspects of the making of this environment. It first starts from the reference gathering and the ideas behind the tower. It then explores some of the motivation and personal story as to why I decided to create WoW fan art in the first place.

Later, after the reference gathering, we look at the initial blockouts and the sketching of ideas in 3D. From there, we move into Unreal Engine 5 and set up the scene and begin importing the different 3D models and modular pieces. As a step after, we look at Zbrush and Substance Painter and the process of creating WoW styled, hand painted models and their textures.

I had a lot of fun creating this and I hope that reading this gives you ideas and moves you to create.

Here is a look at the finished result. The artwork is not complete, there will be more work, but this is the stage we are at right now:

Personal Story

World of Warcraft is a big reason, if not the main reason, that many years ago I got into game art and game development. In an upbringing and childhood full of its usual hard moments (the likes of one we all have), I had at least the privilege to have a parent who always encouraged me to pursue my interest and play as many video games, as often as I wished. That is even if back in those years, around her, all other parents looked down on computer games and their influence on children.

My mom not only believe these games are beneficial and foster creativity, but she also spend the time to play them together with me and my brother. As such, it was only natural that what at first was just gaming soon grew into interest of how these games are made. It further took me down the path of art and ultimately lead me where I am now as an artist.

I am frankly surprised that after all these years I have never sat down to create a stylised art scene. More specifically in the visual style of games like World of Warcraft. I’ve decided that will change now.

Video Devlog

As I was writing this blog post, I also started making a YouTube video that goes over lots of what is written here. If you wish, you can watch it here:

I love the written format as a medium, which is why I create these blogs here.

At some moments, there are time-lapses and sped up footage of my art pipeline that would be challenging to showcase or write in detail. As such, after reading the blog post, if you wish to see much more about the Apexis Mage Tower project, give the video above a try.

Reference

Once I knew my next project will be a WoW inspired diorama (fan art), I was left with the question of what exactly will this scene depict? Will it be a building? A small encampment in open air? Perhaps an interior instead? Color choice, mood and lighting? What expansion from the game will be its main influence?

Before deciding onto a Mage Tower, I actually first went after a tower dedicated to some of the professions in World of Warcraft. My pick was Alchemy.

But after exploring alchemy, one of my friends - Oliver - did a paint over onto one of my screenshots of my tower. He then gave me the idea to go for a Mage tower. We will take a look at the concept art he created a bit further into the page.

I set off to gather different screenshots from the game and get some ideas. I went down a path that ultimately revealed additional concepts and inspired me to pick “Apexis” crystals as a motive in the visuals of the tower.

Mage Tower

I thought my first influence would be that it would be fun to create a mage tower. That would be the type of building I go for. In my mind’s eye, I immediately saw “Khadgar’s Tower”, hidden between giant mushrooms in Talador. Introduced in the expansion “Warlords of Draenor”.

I also looked at Dalaran, seen through the expansions. I turned to more modern examples as well. Those are from the recently released expansion “The War Within”.

I sent all of these screenshots to Ollie, thinking out loud about my ideas. I then started 3D blocking in Blender. Whilst creating the main shapes of the tower, I got side tracked and thought I could maybe turn the tower into an Alchemy tower.

But whilst I was doing that, Ollie did a paint over on my blockout and he convinced me that I should stick with the more simple, and elegant idea, of going for a Mage Tower instead of Alchemy Tower.

Apexis Crystals

Right from the start I knew that I wanted to have some crystals in my 3D scene. Crystals are incredibly fun to make, as you might have seen me write about over here.

As such I flew over Outland and explored every nook and cranny of the floating in space lands there. Among the many pictures I took, the ones that spiked my interest the most were these crystals, seen on the left.

(By the way, I swear I very well know how to take screenshots with the UI of the game hidden away! Every reference pic I take is like that. You’ve caught me in a rare moment of weakness and some of the pics here include my gorgeous game UI. Enjoy it!)

I debated a lot which type, and color of crystal, to go for. After flying through Outland and remembering about Apexis crystals, I opened and read about them further:

Apexis crystals were created by the ancient Anhari and Skalaxi orders of the Apexis to contain knowledge in lieu of scrolls or tomes, and just touching one is enough to gain the knowledge from within them. It is even possible to see the memories of the one who constructed the crystal. In the slowly expanding Gorian Empire, Apexis crystals became highly prized and eagerly sought out by ogre sorcerers.

One configuration of stars causes an unusual vibration in the crystals strewn across Draenor, relics of the ancient Apexis. Some swear that the crystals will multiply when left unattended beneath the night sky, but none have seen the phenomenon firsthand.

― Wowpedia

Crystals that grant you a knowledge written inside them? And they multiply under the night sky? I though this was perfect for my use case, as by then I had already started a little blockout of my scene. I had crawled lots of crystals, as if growing, from a crevice in the ground and up towards the roof of the tower.

I wondered how I will explain why the crystals grew upwards like that. As such when I read that Apexis crystals were thought to multiply, I decided they were meant exactly for me. The fact that they contain knowledge as well, I believed is a perfect match for the pursuit of knowledge a class like the Mages have.

Blockout

After a few hours of sketching my 3D shapes inside of Blender, whilst looking at the WoW tower screenshots, thinking about Alchemy and Mages, I produced this:

Everything was starting to shape up nicely. It was a bit abstract - overly abstract - here and there, but for a few hours of work, I was happy with the artistic direction.

I sat down for some more sketching and refining the next day, and I got to this stage seen below:

Concept Art Paint Over

The above image is when Ollie finally saw my work. He loved it and his immediate reaction was to ask if I could send him a frontal, 2D, no perspective angle of the tower blockout so far. He wanted to paint on top and give me some ideas and I welcomed that warmly. I knew that my work can only improve with his input and feedback. As such I was thankful he is willing to do that for me.

Full Resolution

I sent him the 2D angle of the tower above. Few days later, he came back to me with this:

As you can see, Ollie moved further the shape language, the level of detail and the overall concept of the tower. He came up with the idea that the tower could have three floating spires, instead of one. Those would then be dedicated to the different specialization of the Mages in Warcraft. That is Fire, Frost and Arcane. Their respective colors being orange, blue and pink.

Before and After

Here is comparison between the two, overlaid on top of one another, with an interactive bar that lets you move and see the before and after result.

When I was refining the shapes of my tower in Blender, I already was getting worried that it might be too short on its height. For a tower, it had started to look a bit small due to that. I made it taller a few times, but it was not enough. When Ollie did the paint over, he increased the height and it was an incredible piece of feedback for me, improving the silhouette a lot.

Blender Work After The Concept

I set off to use the concept art from Ollie as my main reference now. In a week time, in my spare time outside of my fulltime Rebellion work, I got to this stage:

In Perspective

The above angle is with a very far-away camera, with low FOV. It forces the perspective out of the shot, but gives me nice visibility. Here is the same stage of art, but seen through a perspective camera:

Here I had made the tower taller, as per Ollie’s concept, but I hadn’t had the chance to get a start on any of the other cool art changes from him:

In this “after” image, I have refined my shapes and done further prop art and modelling work to get me to what Ollie had painted:

(If the tower appears to get a tiny bit shorter in the second shot - note that it doesn’t. Due to me making it taller, I actually had to move the camera backwards in space, further away from it. I did that because otherwise I could not fit it into the composition. Its top was being cut out of the camera view.)

Landscape

With the stage above, I was happy with the progress and I moved into sculpting the land further. I did most of it inside Blender’s sculpting toolset. You can watch a time-lapse of that in the YouTube video.

In Unreal

From there, I moved to export pieces into Unreal Engine 5.

When I set up my blank scene, things looked like this:

After a bit more work, I got to the stage seen below:

I wanted this to be a diorama. That meant that even though I was really pulled into the idea, and the devil spoke into my ear, I shouldn’t listen and should NOT go into making a giant, open-world environment map. Instead, I would keep it to a ‘cut’ of land and a small, manageable portion of work.

Don’t overscope your art. Don’t do a feature-creep, no matter what the devil of over-ambition whispers in your ear!

In order to reflect the above better, I decided to keep the floor and the background into similar hues and have both be a dark value of color. The thinking behind this is that even though the geometry is an island, it would not sit in the sea but instead it would have a 3D cut where the bounds end in flat colors, and the intention is clear that only the diorama part has been refined, no outskirt work.

The next step, and next image, would be the one this article started with. It is seen below. It’s the stage of the project I am at in this moment of time, as of writing this blog.

You can see above, that I twisted the land into a knot. I did that because I wanted to give everything a bit more fantastical, and whimsical look. Something to be more exciting but also fit into World of Warcraft better. The flat land that was seen before, was also giving me worries about scale. With things being so flat on it, it looked like it had valleys that would go for kilometers, but that was not the case. As such making some large knots of “mountains” would give me more opportunity to spice things up.

Images below showcase close up of the tower and we saw some of them at the beginning of the article as well.

Conclusion

In this post we went over the initial idea for this World of Warcraft stylized diorama.

We explored the thought process of making it be a Mage tower. Then heading to the idea of it being an alchemy tower. Then, at the end, circled back to Mages.

We explored different reference gathering in WoW as a game, and references from outside the game too. We took a look at portions of the PureRef moodboard.

Further into it, we looked into initial Blender blockouts and then concept art paint overs on top.

From there, we moved into importing to Unreal 5 and showcasing the tower inside.

All in all, we didn’t go into nitty gritty details, as this was more an exploration of the art pipeline, than a detailed log of how to do specific elements.

We also looked at a video with some timelapses and further, complimentary explanations about the project.

Next Up

Even though this is a World of Warcraft styled diorama, it still is missing a big aspect of the style. That would be the hand painted textures.

In the next blog post, we will explore that. We will look at taking some of the tower props into Zbrush. There we will sculpt details and boolean the pieces together.

Once ready, we will move it back to Blender for by hand retopology.

When that is ready, the pieces will be UV mapped.

After UV mapping, it will be time to take things into Substance Painter and hand paint our World of Warcraft styled textures.

Credits

Oliver Harbour - concept art paint over and further feedback.

Blizzard - In-game screenshots from World of Warcraft.

Bibliography

Video Devlog by me - same one as the link at start of this blog.

Apexis Blast - Hearthstone illustration by Tim Shevtsov.

Apexis Crystals Lore - Wowpedia Fandom.

All the best,

Pete.

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