Command Post Tundra Step by Step

Let's get started...with sky.  I knew I wanted some kind of command base, and I knew I wanted it to be somewhat neutral - neither good or bad, so I went with an overcast type sky.

And of course, being from Washington State originally, where it looks like this most of the time, I put in some Cascade Mountain type terrain formations, because it seemed to fit the sky.

In photoshop, you can generate perspective grid, so I created a quick grid, to help build out the the forms.  I knew going in I wanted some kind of oppressive block, set in nature...so this is the first pass.

After I got it set up, I took a little bit of time to insert details, but again...if it's not really working from the very first rough stage, it's not going to work when you add color and details.  So good bye to you. building.

Just to break up my approach, I just winged out another idea.  Which I love, but it is not what I had in mind for the image, nor does it fit with the background.  In this rough stage, in seems like it could be a docking station for a gnarly pirate space ship - if it got developed further, I think it could be pretty cool.  But not for this one, save it for later maybe.

OK, now I'm on to something, an image that I had in my head, but had a little trouble articulating it as an image.  I also thought of lifting it off the ground, as if the construction crew did a mountain-top removal before building.  The thought being that they could fortify the defenses against a ground attack, and give it a better overall sense of scale.

This is where I employ the focus passes from the Roman Lion and Predator images - I start to develop the colors and details, using more opaque colors and smaller brush sizes.

While I was pretty happy with how it was going over all, I wanted to add in a little bit more to the compositions, to both offset the new construction details to the structure, and give some more scale examples.  So I dropped in a ship, following in some landing lights.  Unless there's a person there, it's still a little abstract, but the lights are meant to be about light pole size, and the ship is a transporter, about Blackhawk copter sized.

And here is the final, tightened up, to a point.  The goal was to only spend a day on this, but since I had a go around with what the building would be, I think it stretched to about 10 hours overall.  But I thought this was a good place to leave it, it's always open to go back and spend more days on it, really tightening up the details, and exhaustively complete the design.  But, you wouldn't get a better idea overall of the theme and location than with just this.

So, after another go at environments, I'm happy with this quick render background, now it's time to try some quick render characters...