Style matrix - Project 3 - Through the gateway

New project time again already! I know its crazy how fast time is going. It’s quite intimidating and daunting actually. Anyway what have I decided to embark on as my final project Well From the success of the potion shop and utter failure of the Aviator character model I felt I could tackle a more demanding brief while addressing the issues I had with Zbrush hopefully solving them so I can re-vamp the character from my first project during polish week. To be honest with you I feel I have learnt so much since starting that project I may just model a new character. It’s not like the textures were any good anyway and since learning substance painter I feel like I could easily make the character look so much better. I may even attempt poly painting for the face and skin who knows.

So which brief did I choose? I went for the ‘through the gateway’ brief whereby you are given a concept of an archway and it is your task to interpret what could be on the other side of this gateway. Similar to the other GP environment brief, this one just gives you the archway. Initially looking at the arch I notice the swirl curls on either side of the base. These coupled with the concept art of Japanese styled houses and distinctive trees give a very authentic Japanese feel to the environment however I felt this was too typical and has most likely been done already. Instead I looked into swirl patterns throughout history and stumbled across Aztec and Mayan carvings which looked very similar and could be interpreted to this idea. I immediately started browsing Pinterest and the web assembling mood boards to feed off of once I began concepting.

gateway_moodboard1

gateway_moodboard2

My material was a mix between stone carvings and buildings to small environments associated with the Aztecs and Mayans. The image that particularly caught my attention was the one featured on the second mood board with a green grungy murky swamp in the centre with a crumbling stone slab pathway around it leading to a temple structure in the back ground. Immediately I was taken back to early Tomb Raider games I used to play religiously and I felt what a great tribute in my final year to make and environment fitting for a Tomb Raider game. Exploring this idea further I looked into tombs, structures inner buildings even going as far as to pull from the web information boards for Aztec burial chambers named ‘Palenque’s.’ The information was all in Spanish but…. oh yea I’m learning Spanish so that’s useful! I’m quite proud I could translate the boards actually but that is not really an achievement relevant to Game art. Anyway these boards too fed into my reference images for my concept art.

Moving on to quick concepts I’m still trying to get to a level of detail that I understand what is required to make the proposed environment. I’m happier with my style of concepting and I found that leaving the sketching lines as the top layer makes the sketches look good and not need endless time to render in the differing shade and highlight to make the object obvious so for time’s sake I think I will continue to concept this way and save the time consuming rendering for later on and more important artwork. Looking over my sketches I did an equal split of inside and outside locations. Originally I liked my first idea of incorporating the swamp I liked from my mood boards and adding sculptural pieces to it. However when I went on to develop that idea I found that the scene I had designed, featuring a dragon head as the other side of the door way as my centre piece, lacked presence while still needing so many assets to create it that it wasn’t really a viable candidate for a 3 week project. I would need to make a lot of outside elements such as trees plant life and play with lighting not to mention the background assets that the character would be able to see. It all seemed too much work to get done in time. From this insight I moved on to develop my second favourite idea which was the triple tiered throne room. By this point I was leaning more towards Aztec sculpture and art style than any other culture.

Initial concepts

Outside idea developed

Throne room developed

My initial concept was form the perspective at the bottom of the steps looking up at the throne so I decided to create another concept piece looking down to the throne towards the door way. I decided to incorporate the dragon head developed in the previous larger concept art development I had chosen to abandon. This piece I was trying to avoid using any line and just depicting the environment through shade and light. I feel it is more of a success than previous attempts but still not entirely happy. Looking at how much detail I needed to carve into the walls to really sell the tomb as Aztec I knew that to geometrically model them all is naïve even with 80,000 tris. Zbrush would be the ideal way to solve this problem but I’m still quite traumatised by the last project. If I were to use Zbrush successfully I needed to address the issues I encountered on the last project. It only took a day and a half but I managed to create a test tile with a base mesh created in 3DS max import it into Zbrush sculpt a hi poly bake then generate a normal map in Zbrush export it out apply it to a material in unreal engine 4 and have it look identical to the hi-poly sculpt. Big achievement for me.

This little test gave me the confidence to proceed with my concept idea. The remaining day or 2 of the week I spent making an asset list, detailing how I would proceed to make the item and then any notes that might be useful to me, as well as mapping out a husk of the throne room and modelling basic assets I wouldn’t need to take into Zbrush such as the font, treasure items and pottery.

Feedback wise I received some very useful advice from Craig who I asked if the idea was too ambitious to attempt. He seemed to think it was a contained enough project to be manageable. His only concern was the texture budget and the amount of assets that would need unwrapping. His advice was to have as many larger assets symmetrical so I was able to lay them flat over each other and save as much space as possible. Casto also had his input telling me to be careful of getting cultural art crossed as my concepts contained a blend of Mayan, Aztec and other South American tribal cultures. Especially useful was showing me a friend of his portfolio which contained a 3D sculpture of a Aztec temple giving me a standard to aim for particularly the textural sculpting of the jaguar heads which I can transfer to my dragon heads.

All in all a very productive week I feel and next week is going to be very modelling intensive although I really need to be careful how I budget my time.