zbrush hut

I wanted to try and incorporate zBrush concepting into this project and I thought the best way to do that would be to create some assets for the bonobo camp as sculptures.

I wasn't really happy with the freedom in creating somethign complex like a camp using sculpting tools, I used a reference of a celtic settlement hut and tried to create somethign a little more natural looking using that as a guide. I'm not particularly happy with the outcome, it looks a bit generic and I want to try and think of something a bit more creative looking, and also fit with the aesthetic I have established already.

 perhaps I will incorporate the human city remains into it more but then it is going into a more generic post apocalyptic route. I could make it more primitive, like the bonobos are using the remains as caves, perhaps they aren't quite as civilised as I originally intended and they are actually somewhat feral and living in caves, but still using weapons.

focussed painting

I have decided to take the photo sampling method a little further as I feel like it's the method that will give me the best work for now.

 In the last painting it was a bit unguided, I didn't necessarily have a vision other than placing some building ruins into a highlands setting*, and it does the job but it doesn't really tell a story.

*I have been always been looking for pictures of 'the highlands' when I look for reference for the environment, I'm not really sure why but it just feels right to me, I think the atmosphere is perfect for capturing the Dark Souls aesthetic and it's also very fresh and natural which is one of the important things for my setting.

I decided to take a more focussed attempt this time, I wanted to take a similar environment but this time zoom into a specific area and try and give a bit more of a context this time; I would be taking the idea of the bonobos using the ruins as a place to live.

Samples

I took a landscape photograph (one of the same ones I used last time) and place a roughly cropped segment from a photograph of a church, then I adjusted the colour using the colour balance tool in photoshop to ground it in the environment, I wasn't too careful with losing edges as I intended to use the photo sample purely for colour/value and texture.

I painted over the whole thing to add consistent and dramatic lighting and to make the building the decayed and incorporated into the environment.

finally I added some finishing details (albeit still rough) to the painting and adjusted the colours and levels for dramatic purposes and I still have the Dark Souls aesthetic in mind as inspiration. I added a figure into the scene which is an early idea for what the bonobo tribesmen might look like as a size reference and also context for the painting, as well as adding some territorial/warning graffiti onto the church exterior to illustrate how it is lived in by the bonobos.

I wanted to also reflect on how I feel about photo sampling now. I was initially very against the idea but I think that is my pride getting in the way, I'm annoyed with myself that I don't have the skills yet to create a painting like this without 'cheating'. However I am beginning to understand the value of photo sampling as simply a very useful technique for getting an idea from your mind to the canvas and there is actually a lot of freedom as long as I use the reference sparingly and don't try to rely on it too much, I may continue to just use this technique from this point onward.

I think I have established the overall aesthetic of the game to a satisfactory extent now: I have a setting and I'm happy with how the old human buildings fit in with the new world environment so now I would like to focus in on how the bonobo camps would look and create a final painting using photo sampling based on concepts from now, as I am basing this environment on the highlands I may look at reference from Celtic tribal settlements.

sketchbook drawing and photobashing

One of the difficulties I have in environment painting is in getting the foundation set up, I don't really like drawing digitally and I find it hard to really get a good foundation for a painting purely by painting, I feel like I need to set up a line art first. I decided to do a drawing of a simple environment in my sketchbook in the same kind of scenario as before, a buried church spire but this time with some context, I added a doorway into some lair with animal skeletons and sticks around the outside as a warning, this give some kind of an environmental in-game context.

I don't feel as though the painting stage was successful at all, I just find it too difficult to get a good value range, I started with black and white to keep it simple and even then I had trouble, I'm going to just leave it like this for now and do a bit more practice before coming back to it.

After that I also did some experimentation with a new method again, similar to one I did before this time I used a photo-bashing method:

 I took numerous photographs and sampled them over the painting and modified them enough that the composition was changed from the original photographs, I then painted over the majority of the canvas while colour picking in order to hide most of the detail, while letting some get through for texture.

I then added in the church buildings into the landscape, choosing samples that I thought would fit into the colours of this painting so far. 

As the lighting scenarios were different for each of the church buildings that I sampled I then painted over them to make the lighting match and ground them into the environment further. then I added details to finalise the composition. 

I added the sprout as a compositional device, also to add colour and to allude to the concept of the idea that while humanity has gone the world is not yet dead and life will continue to flourish, which is a core theme of my idea.

I'm not sure how I feel about the photo-bashing method, so far the outcome has been much more passable than any of my other attempts so far but I can't shake the feeling that it's really just cheating and may be a very limited tool, but perhaps this is just what I need considering my weakness for colour and value for now, perhaps if I don't rely on it too much as a crutch it may not be so bad, and my best option so far. After all it's concept art not a fine art piece.

Samples

Visit to the Bridewell Museum in norwich

As a timetabled part of the course I went to the Bridewell museum with my group. I took the opportunity to look around and try and find some inspiration for my environment, I figured I would be more likely to find inspiration for assets rather than the environments themselves so with that in mind I had a look around.

I drew a heater and an old decorative pillar, I thought I could potentially merge them to create sort of a futuristic looking building with some elements of old styles which I think was successful, of course the whole building would never be visible in any of my environments but having some idea of how they should look should help in contextualising things.

I also created a sort of church spire buried in dirt in Maya so that I could bring it into zbrush later and start creating some more detailed concepts and potentially paint over them later. In the end I discovered that the basic window shapes I added in maya were actually a nuisance and it would be better to just bring a very very basic spire shape with no details at all into zbrush so I will redo that later after I experiment with photo bashing.


One more thing that I have been putting off that I really need to consider is the level of decay in the building peaks, I have been lazy so far and just been painting them as though they were almost fresh buildings with bits broken off but in reality after tens or hundreds of thousands of years there would be much more extreme decay, maybe they would just look like rock at that point with shards of glass sticking out at points perhaps.

Painting with a reference

In the last painting I did I wasn't too true to my original concept which was to have still archaic buildings to be peaking from the ground, and the actual landscape itself was pretty boring (just green hills for miles) This time I actually took some context for the setting which was a sort of 'highlands' setting, I took a reference and then used that for a guide for the colours but this time not placing ot colour picking at all.

Again I'm not particularly happy with this, while it's better than the one before I don't like how the colours look at all, they are not convincing and the whole thing is lacking in texture so that is something I want to work on, I did make some progress in learning how to paint clouds though, I think it is the first time I ever convincingly painted them so I'm happy with that.

Unfortunately I did lose my reference but I did use one for this. As I mentioned before my understanding of value placement in a landscape is poor so that is going to be my next step in terms of technical practice, and in developing my concept and technique I will also try to create some photobash concepts. I have found some images that look like they could fit some building ruins in there nicely.

http://www.scotlinetours.co.uk/uploads/tour_picture/image/52331a561d924ed7e0000520/large_11-Scotline_Tours-Isle_of_Skye-Scotland-West_Highlands_Tour.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/2001-ScotlandHighlands-TheQuirang2.jpg

some very early research and environment practice

For the environments it will be important to consider how much of a leftover influence that human architecture has in the landscape, I want it to be barely noticeable, as if the left over rubble and spires from human buildings could almost be mistaken for natural rock formations to the animals and bonobos there now.

I wanted to consider how the earth may get to that state of almost completely covering our architecture, I considered the law of superposition, which is used to identify the age of sediment, the lower you go the more ancient the sediment. I have yet to look into in detail but I will try to look into whether this is a potential way in which the human buildings will have been buried and if so how long it would take/how far in the future the game would need to be set then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SEUtahStrat.JPG

A personal observation and peeve of mine is that Futuristic films and games seem to assume that in the future all architecture will be 'futuristic' whereas the more likely scenario would be that the architecture from today would largely remain but with the futuristic buildings in addition/replace some old buildings, so I don't necessarily want the peaking buildings in the ground to look particularly futuristic, perhaps some will but for now I will probably have modern and old style buildings, or cathedrals, as they are large and have a potentially nice aesthetic.

On this page I was exploring how this design may actually play into the game and environment design, for example a protruding church spire may have a hole leading into the ancient interior where some tribe of bonobos may live. I also looked at just how a an area of skyscrapers like manhattan may create a large hills with the buildings just peaking out of the top.

Another thing that was important to me was that the landscape wasn't a typical post apocalyptic brown and grey wasteland, so far in the future a new ecosystem is flourishing so I want it to look like a young earth from before humans started colonising and building cities/destroying ecosystems, Only with that small hint of humanity peaking through the sediment from place to place.

Here I am exploring that idea with really rich and lush natural colours in the hills, it's boring and not very detailed yet but I just wanted to establish and capture that freshness. This was also a practice piece and an experimentation with a variation of a painting method I learnt (but never used) but Feng Zhu (concept artists/lecturer and FZD School)

What Feng Zhu does in some images to set up a colour scheme and 'texture' for the painting is that he takes a photo graph and pastes it sporadically over the page leaving no canvas, and then uses that as a base for his painting. To get me started I just took a screenshot from the game 'Flower' as I knew it would have that rich colour I was looking for and painted over it while colour picking, as I was just painting over the whole image I didn't want to leave any in the background so I painted over the entire thing.

http://venturebeat.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/flower-game-5.jpg

I didn't really like this method too much but it did work, as I usually have trouble getting started with my colours in landscape painting, I am going to try a few other methods too now though like just creating a unique composition using a reference, a technique called photobashing, and on top of that some general studies too, starting with value as I feel that that is affecting my ability to pick colours too.

Post-Post Apocalypse Concept art

For BA6 I will be tackling the concept art for a game set in the distant future long after humans have gone extinct. Left behind is a culture or robots and a highly evolved species of Bonobo's that have reached a point in their evolution similar to that of human tribal cultures, inhabiting the world in communities and groups.

I hope for this project to take me throughout next year too so I can expand on the world and concept but for BA6 I will be focusing on using painting and sculpting techniques to develop the environments.

In order to develop the environments I will need to decide on a number of factors and develop on them such as:
Where is the game set
How far in the future
How long have humans been extinct/how much of a role does human architecture play on the landscape
What is the atmosphere/ecosystem like
How advanced are the Bonobo territories/architecture, are they hunter gatherer tribes or do they live in organised villages or both

as well as the concept side of things I will also be working on developing my painting and sculpting skills as landscapes have long been a weak point of mine, so I will be developing my skills in composition, colour, rendering and perspective.