Recently, I’ve begun to focus more on my Islands map for Team Fortress 2. I’ve created a few versions of a rock wall texture for the map as none of the textures included in the game are close enough to what I need for this environment. While I have some completed textures, I’m still working on getting it to look exactly how I want. I also realized, when looking at some of TF2’s official maps, that I’m not quite clear as to how I want the buildings in the environment to look. Should the buildings be mostly concrete, metal, or wood? Do I want small rural shacks, large industrial structures, or interconnected concrete buildings that blend into the natural rock walls? I do have a clearer idea of how the underground interiors will look, but the outside environment is important as well, so I decided I should begin to create more detailed concept drawings of how I imagine all the environments to look.
I began sketching out a landscape, but stopped and thought of how I could show as much information as possible in one drawing. In all reality, I can show plenty of information with simple two point linear perspective, but, admittedly, I went a little overboard and sought out how to make a drawing that could show two opposite faces of an object at once. My answer lay in five point curvilinear perspective. In all honesty I had to Google for this for a brief explanation of how to do it, although, it’s rather simple—it just uses four vanishing points placed around a circle and a final point in the center (of what could be called a sphere) to serve as the zenith or, in this case, the nadir. What I found though is that, depending on how your subject is meant to be viewed, you could use this center point to align any edge, not just those aligned to the z axis. 
You can see this in the second sketch where I aligned all lines on the y axis to the center point. The last sketch reveals the entire outdoor environment nestled inside the island. Most of the buildings are very simple and the area represented is a lot smaller and more basic than how I really want it to look, but it was still fun creating this type of view—it’s like a bird’s eye view of the area seen through a fisheye lens.
As fun as this was, curvilinear perspective, at least of this type, is not what I really need, so now I have to move on to drawing the environment so that it seriously and more accurately represents the space as intended. This will be cool too though, and if I get it down well enough I’ll go ahead and color the drawing. Yay!
