Echoes - The Nursery

Been working on this the past couple of days, to give myself a break from trees and plants.

I'm modelling stuff in batches, and then will texture the same, so I think over the next few days I'll move over to texturing a bunch of the stuff that I've modelled.

In the game, these are looking to go into the Summer environment amongst the ruins, so I shall be texturing them decayed and knocked about a bit! But these items are going to be in one of the central rooms of the level, and hopefully the area where you find out a lot about the back story of what's going on. I just need to get around to writing the fluff with the rest of the team and it's starting to look very real!

Echoes - Trees

I choose to create the trees for our games project, and while there was an option to try and find a tree generator and tweak the stuff, I took this opportunity to learn zbrush a bit better.

I got some really nice shapes from using zspheres, they were based off bonsai trees as I felt this style of tree but much bigger would quite fit the sort of fantasy/surreal feel which the game is going for.

I then imported them into 3dsmax, and optimized them a bit. My plan is to take them into the engine and just move each one around a bit, scale and that sort of thing so they don't all look too similar. I might also come back and try and place one of these trees cover a rock or something.

Other set pieces I have left to create - rocks, plants, bushes, hedges, cliff like pieces and shaping the terrian!

Echoes - Dragons

Final dragon turnarounds and concept art. Not entirely sure on the colour of the feathers, but I feel I'll play around with this more in the production phase.

I'm hoping I've done most of the hard thought on it's design before building it, but I'm sure something will pop up. While I don't normally view myself as a concept artist, I found the design process for this dragon has made me want to work a lot harder on my concepting skills in the further. So I'll be trying to keep my painting skills up to date while modelling, as well as life drawing.

*Backgrounds on the sheets are not mine, but I've been unable to find the artist whose they are.

Echoes - Summer Buildings

Here's some development for the type of building we're envisioning for the project. I don't normally draw buildings so was quite pleased how quickly I ended up producing these, and felt it was good practise for both my drawing and modelling skills.

Echoes - Summer Development

Happy New Year! 

Not much to say really, been working at trying to improve my concepting skills while at the same time trying to nail what I had in mind for the game I'm going to be working on for my major project this year. The design progress has been very enjoyable, especially getting feedback from other members of the team on how to better improve my work and to aim towards something we're all happy with.

Here's my development pages for the trees, and some of the prop items which are going to be used for puzzles or other interactions in the game. 

Seasonal Environments

Had a lot of work I've been doing managing a game project and in unity, so there hasn't been a huge amount of art work for me to show. But here's some of the environment designs I've been working on.

These two are meant to be on a very summery but over grown environment, in two key locations. I'm hoping to further develop the environment within the next couple of weeks so that the concept sketches are feeling a bit more summery than they are at the moment. As I'm not sure how much of the sky you can see in the environment, I'm thinking I might need some shafts of light which break through the overgrown trees.

These two are for the winter environment I'm working on, I'm looking at there being lots of lights around the scene which are yellowy/orange to contrast against the white/grey/bluey background to them. Also, there's going to be a maze so I need to come up with different maze concepts over the next few weeks to fully explore the potential of the maze looks. 

And here's the colour palettes I've suggested for the environments.

Over the course of the next week I plan to use this to better develop the black and white thumbs I've produced.

So, onwards, and hoping I get further with my game whitebox and the designs I have going!

Kimiko and co!

Finally, here's the videos of the base mesh of my character, and the finalised props for the project we've just finished! The main aim of the project was for us to get used to using Maya as an alternative to 3dsmax. Annoyingly I've now developed a little bit of a love hate thing for Maya...  half the things seem to take twice as long, and then the other half are super speedy quick. Now if only I could remember how to navigate the viewport in max...

Here's Kimiko from Dresden Codak and props =) (Kimiko and other designs all belong to Aaron Diaz, I have simply edited them to try and get them to work in 3d. Now go read his webcomic if you haven't http://dresdencodak.com/)

Next step in this module will be to take the character and put her in a games engine and look at shaders and such, which I am really looking forward to!