It's been a while since I managed to work on this.
I wanted to make completely painted wood texture and to try out Coat 3D for that. I'm still discovering stuff there so this is achieved with default brush. For the first hand painted stuff I did, I am pretty happy with the results.
I also managed to create a simple scene for this bridge, so I expand things further and go back to the initial design I shown in my previous posts. A lot of inspiration for this scene came from here. I just hope that I will finish my scene soon, so I can post it on Artstation in my portfolio.

I do my sketches in 3d rather then drawing, because I really feel more confident that way, and I leave behind a lot of 3D models that can be reused later for future designs.

 Some design process and creative chaos within a file.

First thing that I wanted to do is a bridge. I really like to do my sketches rather in 3d then by drawing because over the 17 years in that field I really feel fluent in modeling directly from my head and experimenting with shapes and trying different approaches. Also 3DS Max, as my weapon of choice, is offering a lot of handy tools for easy experimenting with different shapes. I couldn't  survive without FFD modifiers and Shift tools in Graphite modeling tools. Below are the four candidates for the bridge that I managed to save for presentation during the creative process.

Once I decided on bridge, stairs were simple to design. I always liked  amorphic shapes and that tendency of mine just popped out here as well. I still haven't decide if I am going to do ZBrush sculpting or leave the low poly models and jump to painting textures. That decision is for later, when I create rest of the assets.

This is a sketch for simple level inspired by handheld Legend of Zelda games. Assets are simple placeholders that will be replaced by actual models as I progress. plan is to have a ground level and a simple dungeon below.
To be honest. I think thaht I will keep this version as well and just add textures onto models and crate a voxel version as well.