Games Mechanic - The Unpleasentness of Mogg

Now that New York's Rooftops are complete it's time to decide on another project.
Together with a team we have decided that we will pursue a fantasy game. The idea behind it is that we all feel confident and familiar with the genre. We all have very similar interests so it was something that we definitely wanted to do. After we had a group talk we have decided that we will focus on an Arena based game in which player will face various enemies in pursue of new gear and upgrades. Very simple concept, but what we wanted to do with the game was to achieve a painterly, almost cartoony look. We looked at various games that had a very simliar style. When we spoke of our game we though of World of Warcraft, Fable franchise and recently released MMORPG Wildstar. All of these productions had a lot in common. What appealed to us was a vibrant colour palette, hand painted textures and exaggerated player models. This was something that we wanted to have in our game.
My role as a Concept Artists / 3D texturing required of me to produce various sketches and paintings that could suggest how our game could look and feel. At the start I had a free hand at what I wanted to paint. Many of my first drawings were very random, not much of a context to them. Our producent, Stefan has given me a sheet with character names and asked me to produce few sketches based on these. It was quite a challenge but I definitely enjoyed it.

As you can see from the sketches, these were very random. As I said before it was quite hard to produce drawings from just a few words that were provided to me.

Personal Work - Zbrush

Here's something that I have been working on in my free time. I am still learning zbrush but I am quite enjoying the workflow and what I can achieve with the software. Below I have created two characters and I wanted to see how far I could take them using both Photoshop and Zbrush.

Both models were quite random. I like to go into zbrush without any ideas in my head of what I want to create and just start producing. With this process I don't really feel attatch to what I am making which definitely leaves me a lot of room for experimenting.

The texture on top of the chracter were made using Zbrush's polypaint feature. It's a very interesting tool which quickly allows me to create skin texture and paint straight onto the chracter without exporing any UVs.

When I had these two characters painted I have expored the pictures and I have placed them inside Photoshop. I haven't done anything crazy with these apart from slightly tweaking the colours, adjusting depth of field and giving then some painterly feel at the base of their chests,

I definitely enjoyed working on these and I will use the same exact process in my future Zbrush works in hope to achieve even better results.

Personal Work - Dota 2 Tidehunter!

Recently I have been looking through works of my favourite Concept Artists and I have been quite heavily influenced by Mike Azevedo who took designs from Dota 2 and recreated character using his own designs. While this might not sound as an interesting idea I thought I should give it a go. I chose one of the chracters called Tidehunter, who is considered to be water creature.

I quite enjoy the design of this particular character. He feels very powerful and strong. Based on a small research I have started working on my own design for the character. While Azevedo changed his designs completely I wanted to stick to the original look and see if I would be able to recreate a character from a 3D model shown above. 

I've started with the exact same process that I always follow. At first I have created a line work and then I have applied a color wash on top of the drawing. I intentionally did not paint the lower part of the body because I had an idea of him standing in the water, almost as if he was carried by the waves. I have quickly decided on the light directions and I've started to paint it in. 

And here is the final illustration. I really enjoyed working on this project. I intentionally have decided to leave the background simple because I wanted to put the main emphasis on the character. There were many things that I've learned during the process and I am willing to do more paintings of this kind. 

The Fallen - Turntable

I really enjoyed working on a turntable for my character. This was something that I definitely looked forward to. I've decided to slightly change my character, because I felt it didn't look as strong and powerful as I thought in my head. I've decided to reduce his size and give him more of a human look. I took away some of his mass and decided to slightly change the armor design. I've also added a shield and a spear which worked superb with the design.

I am quite happy with the helmet which was quite a challenge to paint from different angles. The idea of it being brutally placed onto the head of character really worked well with the design. I have intentionally made armor and weapons look worn out simply because it gave my character an impression as if he took part in a lot of wars and fights.

Overall I am quite happy with the final outcome. My chracter looks a lot more believable now and it's definitely something that I had in my for quite some time. I looked at a lot of refrences from a TV show "Spartacus", because I always thought of my character as an old mythological creature set in the times of old Greece / Sparta.

The Fallen - Variations

With all the sketches completed it's now time to create a color study of my character with couple variations. I've decided not to mess with the armor, for a simple reason; I think it really resambles Fallen's character and it fits him perfectly. Instead I've decided to play around with different weapons and helmets designs.

To be honest I have never done any character variations so it was quite hard to come up with ideas or even find a way to produce them. I have looked through various concept arts for games and movies and I had a clear idea on how to work on my character to make him more interesting and give him new look. 

As you can see I have drawn couple of different weapons. A classical sword which didn't really feel right compared to his size and looks. I quite enjoyed giving him the mace and an axe. These two felt more powerful and definitely have had good impact on the character look.

As far as the helmets go, I looked at some designs from Dark Souls and I decided to give them not only a different shape but also a texture. I think they worked quite well and gave me a lot to consider in my final paitning.