Alien Landscape Development

Here is a moodboard including some landscapes I really like the look of:

The things that really appeal to me for alien landscapes are really unnatural, almost artificial spires, constructs or formations that still retain the natural-ness of the world around them implying that they are infact organic.

Another thing that appeals is a really blobby looking environment, as if a small child had got ahold of some experimental anti-gravity play-do and decided to have some fun with it. If subtlety doesn't work, then why not have something that screams 'I'm not normal!'.

Also a very large or close up planet being visible in the horizon always informs the viewer that this is a different world. A big factor which decides if something isn't normal is the scale of things. If there is a really large planet in the atmosphere and it takes up half the sky then it really does give a sense of scale. One thing I want to try for this project is have a visible planet, but half buried in the sand of the planet the viewer is on. Implying that this planet is so large in its scale that it can even have crashed planets on its surface.

And the final detail is the colour. The world we live in can look very colourful at times yes but more often than not its close to one level of colour in common weather conditions (No offense england) and its something we're very used to. If another world has the ability to have so many shades, tones and levels regardless of the weather or light level then it really seems otherworldly.



I also have some ideas for plant life in this environments, using the scale factor and colour factor. I got the idea when generally surfing the internet and stumbling upon these images of water droplets colliding with eachother:

Now the second I saw this image it really gave me the idea to make twisting oddly shaped mushrooms that glow and have weird organic decorations that probably serve no purpose. The image alone almost look like trees from another world, combining that with how the scale will be depicted I'm sure it will seem very alien indeed.

This design does seem very similar to the kind of wild plants featured in James Cameron's Avatar, and I think it'd be a good idea to get some reference images from the film itself, seeing as it is about an alien landscape.