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.

final sculpt render

Finishing sculpt

I have added some final finishing touches to the previously present assets and also added more that weren't added in the last update.

I was going to originally give the archer a elaborate glove on one hand to accentuate that he is an archer as I wouldn't be including the actual bow in the sculpt. 

 I started off sculpting this just to get a rough idea of the shape based roughly on the reference below. I decided after getting to this point that the glove looked too garish and took away from the previous subtlety of the design which was important to me so I removed it entirely.

I did like the idea of having one gloved and one naked hand though, having the dominant hand gloved would add a bit more context to the character.

I sculpted straight onto the base mesh that I used, on one hand a leather glove based on a driving glove and on the right a naked hand, this adds a bit of stylistic asymmetry as well as supplying context for the character, one hand is in more need of protection as he works the string of his bow.

I wanted to give the archer only one arrow, but a problem I was faced with is how do I present the arrow, I don't think an archer would bring a quiver just to carry one arrow so I had to think of how he might go about it, initially I thought of a thin rope around his back with the arrow tied to that but I didn't really have any idea as to how specifically I would go about making it.

I tried using a cylinder placed through the body to give the impression of  a rope hanging around his body, I used a similar mething for the cloth around his waist. I realised quite quickly that it wasn't going to give me the effect I was looking for so I went back to the drawing board and tried to think of something that would give the impression I wanted more, thinking about utility too, he would need quick access to the arrow.

I did some very quick sketches just to visualise the idea that I had, I think thought it look good and went with the overall aesthetic that I wanted to go for of a minimalistic set up so an arrow hanging from a rope around the waist would work.

I created an arrow quite easily in Maya and imported it, that created the rope by stretching out a small cylinder then I gave it texture using the standard brush I created the knot but just using the inflate tool on high intensity under the arrow.

Sculpting update

I had originally intended to create a whole new model for the helmet since I wasn't happy with how it was looking. Instead I decided to just add details to this one and fix some of the things that were wrong, like the eye holes being too round.

The Ottoman helmets I saw always had this ornamental headpiece on the front that I was reluctant to add as I didn't want the character to appear as just an ottoman solder. I decided to try it anyway just to see how it looked and I used shadowbox to create the pattern on the end. I actually really liked how it added some finer detail to the helmet so I kept it, since the overall design of the clothing is much different to an ottoman soldier I figured I would get away with it. I'm really happy also with how I made the leather ear-pieces, originally I was going to just add some rivets and alphas for texture but I had the idea to add some deformation around the rivets as the leather ages and became dog eared and loose. I just achieved this effect using the move tool in a short amount of time and I'm really pleased with the difference it made.

I haven't changed a lot in the body, I added some more freehand details to the drapery, I took what I got from the alpha and just exaggerated some of the curves giving it a more organic look.

I was reluctant to start detailing the pouches on his waist since I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do with them yet. But after playing around with the leather ear pieces before I thought that after considering their use and wear it might be easier, so it really didn't take me long to detail one of the pouches by considering the contents and mass, then I copied that one and edited it to make the other one smaller and with less contents to add variation.

More alphas

I really liked using alphas so i took them and started working them over some other parts of my sculpt that I feel could almost be finished enough to utilise them and also to experiment.

Here is a close up of the cloth using the alpha texture, I am confident leaving it there for now since I won't be working on that subtool for a while now and I can easily undo it. I tried to be quite subtle about just suggesting the material rather than printing it over the whole thing in a really obvious way, as that is kind of the effect you would get looking at it in real life. I may have done this at too low a polycount but I can undo and increase that later if I need to, I may add some further detail to the creases first too.

I got a bit liberal with the alphas in the helmet, the reason being that I intend on redoing it later anyway (it's a placeholder for now) I just really wanted to experiment with some mixture of alphas to create different textures along the helmet. For example I used the lines on the top of the helmet to really differentiate the material and went with more smooth with scratches for the body of the helmet. in the cheek crevices I changed the material again adding a bit of texture as a stylistic choice and to add variation.

I used a premade chainmail alpha for the chainmail but I'm not sure how I feel about it, perhaps I just need practice but I am finding it difficult to get the texture consistent. I may try again but on the other hand I am wondering how necessary it really is to have it uniform anyway as it may not actually make all that much difference.

 I made this really quick mock alpha just to try it out on the helmet since I wanted some pseudo-Arabic kind of inscribings on it (I feel this gives the character more a sense of purpose, having a religion or creed) I think I need to make the background a 50% grey as the white actually makes the whole thing bulge out, I managed to minimise the damage using focal shift and the smooth tool but in my final attempt it would be better to not have to do that.

sculpt iteration

I took the loose idea I had from the sketch and started sculpting different iterations of the same design, initially the idea was to have most of the clothes loose material with only tight areas in the feet, hands and the middle of the torso where the armour restricts the cloth. I kind of imagined that this would just work with the archer image, making him look swift and agile.

I didn't like this at all, not only was the cloth kind  of awkward to sculpt for me but the whole design just looked very bulky and not what I was going for at all.

I decided to take the same design and just balance it a bit, I thought the 'skirt' looked fine but I wanted to change the top I though this would achieve the look I was imagining better.

I remade the upper body and not only does the whole design flow a lot better now but the chainmail coming from the helmet looks more fitting, not that that was a particularly important part of the design concept but I thought it looked a little awkward before. The chainmail guarding the neck but hanging freely gives more of a sense that this guy is not a conventional soldier, I think this reinforces the concept that he is a righteous law holder who acts in temperance. The fact that his face is obscured, even though I wasn't fond of that at first actually reinforces the concept too I think. 

the cloth was kind of giving me some trouble so I was looking at some reference images, I had been using some Jean-Leon Gerome paintings as reference as I already had some on my computer, so I used some of the characters in his paintings as reference to get an idea of how the clothes should look. I figured I could get a pretty good pattern using a rake-like brush so I had a look at the available alpha brushes and found one that I thought was perfect.

One of the problems to consider when using alphas I think is restraint, I could just rake the brush over but I think that at that point it looks kind of uniform and unnatural so I tried to be as minimalistic as I could, using a few stroked to suggest the effect that I was after, and I also found that switching between the zadd and zsub functions it created a more natural flow. I will certainly consider this in the future.

Some of the additional images I used/will use in reference