One of the things I've been experimenting a lot with lately is various ways and balances of combining 3D and 2D art. Each medium has it's benefits and drawbacks, so I want to do a lot of quick sketching to explore the balance.
The primary benefit of 3D at this point for me is speed. Speed of getting something down, speed of iteration, tons of detail in no time at all. The image above is the 3D render that I painted the final sketch on top of and creating something like this takes less than ten minutes or right around depending on decisions I make and tweaking.
THe drawback is I sacrifice some manual design choices as these mountains are created with sort of randomized noise patterns and displacement. I have a lot of control but not TOTAL control that just painting it all by hand would lend me. Then when it comes to things like atmospheric perspective, it's a lot easier to just paint that vs simulating it in 3D to get it to look how I want. Similar deal with clouds and things like that. It's easier to just paint some clouds vs messing with VDB's for a still image. Of course this is all meaningless for animation. It would mostly need to be done in 3D or you could do some compositing to integrate 2D elements into the BG. Anyway, this is just the result of a night of playing around. Hopefully I'll have more time to crank out a few more experiments like this and be able to effectively incorporate it into work I spend a bit more time on.