Starting Cerberus gateway

Monday was filled with scanning over my mood boards from the previous week and mashing together ideas to form a concept I can work from. In particular I really am drawn to the white triple arch way with large cylindrical pillars tapered towards the tops. Further research reveals this to be the Archway over King Charles Street designed by architect J. M. Brydon and erected during the Victorian era. Its design is very Victorian fashion with elegant spandrels adorning the crevices between masonry. I started sketching out primitive versions of ideas for the gateway. The key things I was trying to tie down with this concept was imposing, elegant, grand yet comical in keeping with the theme. I knew I needed to incorporate the 3 heads of the dog on the gateway somewhere as I knew they were going to be the gimmick that brought the structure to life however I didn’t know if I wanted them carved onto the building, mounted on the front, fitted into the building on podiums or even the adornment for the pillars.

First working on just the structure of the gateway itself I experimented with having the gateway built into a larger building. The benefits of that being that it would block more space within the level and feel more imposing. However by the third rough sketch I found I liked the larger free standing stone gateway more which was inspired by the white archway over King Charles street which I had been so drawn to. As to solve my blocking in more of the level issue I think the free standing gate sandwiched between two of the plain filler buildings I plan on making would be the ideal solution.

Back to the idea for the dogs heads. I tried the aggressive approach I really didn’t like it at all so moving on my next design incorporated a friendly more varied range of dogs heads including a German Sheppard and bull terrier and a pug which I found to have the most interesting skulls. Now as fun as it would be to create all three of the dog breeds in skull form the time scale wouldn’t be reasonable. I would need to pick one to mount onto the front of my building. As much as I like pugs I don’t think its as recognisable or as ‘dog’ like as the German Sheppard and the bull terrier just looks weird so German Sheppard it is and I can change the expression of the skulls if I make them out of 2 pieces.

Great so that’s the heads sorted now to design the iron work for the gateway. So in effect the Cerberus gateway is a combination of 3 elements those being the main frame/structure, the dogs heads decoration and the ironwork to tie it all back to the Victorian era. What was I saying in the previous blogs about picking this structure because it was less complex….oh how Im eating my words now. Anyway back to the mood board the iron gates mixed with the brick structures is really to give me a sense of how the two elements should sit together also to give me a variety in shapes and swirl decorative forms to design and make my own gate. Returning to my sketches earlier I sketched in various gate designs which were following the same kind of style as the gates on my mood board. Strong outer shape with vertical bars or poles with some swirl pattern adorning some part of it. In sketch A the gates design is all around the top. With B I experimented and had the metal work around the form of the gate and also on the main body of the gate itself. By sketch C I thought it would be a novel idea to make a shape within the iron work of the gate. Something that could be symmetrical on both sides but still be and interesting shape such as a dog paw. I fell in love with this concept straight away. It was at this time I felt it would be equally novel to create an iron work decorative topper similar to that above the gateway on the top left of my mood board. So I created a design that looked a bit like dogs ears again to link to the dogs heads that will be the decoration on the front. Putting the whole thing together I created a working concept to work from and I will create a nice concept piece a bit later on.

Moving on with production during the later half of the week I was able to block in the archway quickly as it was standard shapes. The iron work topper was a bit more complex but effectively it was just a case of creating and unwrapping one half and then using symmetry to create the other half I think the C is really cute and obviously stands for Cerberus but I have been asked about what it means multiple times already which concerns me a little bit. Still Im happy with the final result.

Moving on to the dogs heads which I knew would be the most time consuming part of the production of this asset I decided to skulpt them in Zbrush as the organic shapes are harder to create in 3DS max. Modelling the top of the skull and the jaw separately allows me to later on position them differently altering the expression of that dog head to create 3 separate beings but with 2 meshes duplicated.

The sculpting stage went well despite me still having my reservations about Zbrush. The skull and jaw section together after being decimated and exported came to around 31,346 meaning I was most definitely needing to re-topo the dog’s heads especially if I wanted 3 of them to be in the level. But that was next week’s job.

#sculpt #cerberus