Art Update: Fall 2015

Been a while since I posted any art! Here are some of the pieces I have been working on this semester:

Vehicle: 1972 Winnebago Brave

Here are some final beauty shots of my vehicle project this semester, a 1972 Winnebago Brave, modeled in Maya 2015. Later on in the semester this vehicle will be implemented into a racing game being constructed by all of the sophomore classes.

(Click on the images to view them in full resolution)

In these shots the model has been implemented into Unreal Engine 4, with 6 different materials applied, 3 being tiling 'generic' materials for the metal and rubber, one 1:1 painted texture for the body, a simple cloudy texture for the windows, and a customizable license plate, which I plan in the future, when we begin implementing the cars into our race game, to make a randomly selected material chosen each time the vehicle spawns.

Concept Work: Song of the Ten Thousand Year Tapestry

I've been thinking about what I want to do for thesis, and since I had a little bit of free time I thought I'd whip up some early stuff so I remember what the ideas were. Admittedly it's quite early to be thinking about, but I would like to build up ideas while I have the time to think.

Song of the Ten Thousand Year Tapestry is a fairytale adventure set in the Dark Ages. A tailor's son tries to save his family treasure, a magic self-weaving tapestry that depicts his family's past, present, and future, from an evil king (a fairytale version of William the Bastard) seeking to abuse it for his own purposes.

Historically, I was heavily influenced by the Bayeux Tapestry depiction of the Battle of Hastings as well as the kingdoms of the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons. In media I drew influences from the movie Dragonheart, and games like the Banner Saga, Legend of Zelda (Both the early concept art of Katsuya Terada and the cel-shaded world of Windwaker), and Broken Age. In a way, this idea is a blending together of many of my favorite things, put into one of my favorite (but criminally under-explored) historical periods, the early Dark Ages of the 8th-10th centuries, a period where the Normans, Byzantines, Vikings, and Saxons all thrived and created much of what would become the classic Middle Ages.

While very Zelda-esque in appearance, 10KT would play much more like a classic adventure game, focusing on the problem-solving, critical thinking, and using the environment over swordplay and violence. Being a simple tailor, you are massively outclassed by the Norman knights who obstruct your path and can only very rarely try to fight them directly. You will soon throw away your sword altogether in favor of a magic needle.

While I am still working out the details on how specifically I would want it to look, there are a few elements I have set. There is very little red, that color being reserved exclusively for the bright Tapestry and important elements relating to it. Environments and characters have exaggerated proportion and a saturated, painted illustration appearance, with duller colors being associated with dangerous things like the Normans, mundane weaponry, and certain architectural elements. Friendlier characters are brighter, cooler shades.

I hope to explore this concept further as the semester goes on, as well as into the summer, along with other possibilities for thesis. I can certainly say right now that I am very excited about this and, if I learn the sufficient skills, I plan to experiment with it in Unreal to further refine my designs.

Farri Mortalborn

I also spent some time trying out new painting techniques. While it started off as a fairly simplistic practice, it very quickly spiraled into a full-blown piece. Whoops.

However I did learn quite a few handy tricks that I hope to implement in the future on Golden Prince and other projects.

The Golden Prince: Printing and Cutting, Cutting, Cutting

So this weekend I started work on the Golden Prince Print and Play, spending most of Saturday formatting and drawing, and most of Sunday cutting, folding and taping everything together.


 The board and army cards were fairly straightforward, requiring only slight trimming and basic folding in half. The soldiers, on the other hand, had to be designed for easy use, as they will be picked up and moved around quite a lot, and needed to be easy to pick up out of a grouping. Flat pieces would easily flip, scatter, be picked up by breezes, and generally make playing the game a huge pain to play, even if it was easier to cut out.


 My solution was to create elongated 'triangular' pieces, that you would fold over and then tape the two tabs at the bottom together to create a simple base with an easily picked up 'point' that would be finger-friendly in tight groupings. The only problem with this is that, unfortunately, it is very time consuming to individually trim, fold, and tape 90 pieces. Since it was a weekend I decided I would just get to work, starting with trimming and folding all the pieces.



This took roughly an hour and a half. Trimming wouldn't have even been necessary under ordinary circumstances, but the cutting board I used would not cut in a straight line, so I instead had to cut each piece by hand.










The end result, however, more than made up for the misery of the preparation process. The board came out a tad smaller than I had intended, but this will be a fairly quick thing to fix as the board is not in its final stages (the game still needs testing!). I look forward to testing tomorrow, to see how well my initial planning works out.

Freshman Flashback

This was the last piece I made for freshman year, in my drawing class. This was an important step in combining several things like 3 point perspective, color theory, and composition all together into one unified piece. It's certainly some of my best work in recent years and appeals to one of my personal interests, Greek Mythology.

Ogel

A quick warm-up sketch that spiraled out of hand and into madness. Ogel was pretty much the most disappointing absentee from the Lego Movie, although he would probably end up usurping Lord Business and creating an army of skeledrones or something.