Old School
The location of the POC is an old school, fallen into ruin due to the long running terror and disarray caused by the town monster.
Now an enclosed cavern the rubble of still burning embers litters the space in piles. Hidden channels allow vermin entry, to survive on remains the monster fails to consume.
The difficulty here is to communicate both the cavernous hell and at the same time immerse the viewer in the environment of an illustrated novel.
The solution must start with surface and material.
Paper has teeth
This watercolour paper has a nice deep tooth, wonderful for watercolour and also charcoal or pastels. Captures a heavy gradient when photographed.
Procedural tools should be good at replicating the texture here.
A nice handmade paper here, it has retained the pattern from the press used to make it.
A very soft surface very nice for pencil drawing.
May be possible to reproduce, however it does not have such a heavy gradient. I may be able to use the image as texture.
Aging and staining
An example of ageing paper from a book published in 1848. Brown coloration exaggerated levels from Photoshop.
The pattern is not a texture but more a stain, although there is a rock like appearance here that could be useful.
An 1878 published book, the ageing has more of a mold like appearance to the staining. Again there is no texture to the pattern. I do like this growth, mold idea.
Printing press imprints
Something that really stood out from this print of Dickens that really struck me, and could be heavily utilised in the narrative of the story unfolding, is the imprint of text from other pages. This imprint in the image bellow is not from print on the back of the page but indentation from the page opposite. This subtle texture could be really useful to literally tell the story of the chapter the viewer is immersed in.
Next?
Add this to a texture, material in unity.