Planning, researching Silvermoon

"Silvermoon city is the capital of the blood elves. Te city was constructed out of white stone and living plants and interwoven with the natural topography of the landscape".

I've created a production roadmap, divided into logical sections:

Research/planning

- Gathering reference
- Reading about Silvermoon
- "Playing" World of Warcraft and looking at the city first hand
- Blocking out drawings
- List of assets
- Designing the color palette

3D phase

- Blocking out the main shapes to achieve proper scale and ratio between objects (3DSMax)
- Test lighting
- Modeling details in ZBrush
- Texturing in ZBrush
- Unwrapping in 3DSMax and Headus UV Layout
- Map baking in XNormal
- Adjusting lighting to blend nicely with textures
- Baking out LightMaps
- Animating
- Rendering Passes

Compositing/Post-production

- Combining render passes in After Effects
- Adjusting colors, levels, adding effects with MagicBullet
- Adding intro and outro with After Effects
- Render out final animation

So, to start out, I've gathered some reference pictures of the gates of Silvermoon. I have also went in-game and took screenshots of important elements: