One of my favorite childhood memories is family game night. Every weekend, my parents and I would take the evening to play a game like Monopoly, Uno, or Rummy. Eventually, time passed and game night ended, but years later it was rekindled. This is thanks to Wil Wheaton's show TableTop on the Geek and Sundry youtube channel. On the show, Wil introduces a board or card game and plays it with a group of guests.
On one such episode, the game played was Settlers of Catan. I had heard of it but never seen it played. After watching the episode, I immediately bought the game and it was soon a regular staple in our house. After several rounds, I thought it would be interesting to interpret the game in a 3D software.
Everything was modelled in Cinema 4D. I started with the base tile shape, then moved on to doing each type of tile. The stone and clay tiles, as well as the desert, were made from the landscape object with some sub-polygon displacement. The wheat utilized the hair obect. The wood and sheep were randomized clones spread out across the tile. For the beach I subdivided a disk and applied displacement to it.
Instead of using Cinema 4D's built in Depth of Field options, I elected to render out a depth map and use it in After Effects to generate the DoF. Final corrections were done in Photoshop.
