Land of Wonder: Update

Monster Mash

The most recent project is on a game called 'Monster Mash'. It is a side scroller in which you play a monster throughout 3 different time eras and gradually evolve. The monster must feed in order to hibernate and then evolve.

My monster is of the fire element and my era will be Egyptian.
Really enjoying making monsters!

Land of Wonder

I've started a new group project to enter into a competition called 'Off the Map' based around the story of 'Alice in Wonderland'.

The idea we came up with was to do an alternate take on Wonderland rather than a more stylised vision of the original premise. Our Wonderland is set in the future when Alice becomes an adult and is about her growing up and taking control of her Wonderland. She becomes Queen and a more imposing figure with command over her own land.

This Wonderland will be renovated into a land full of more grown up pursuits. For example buildings will be built in place of trees and flowers and enslaved card people.

Above is a design for Queen Alice. She has a few physical changes such as a red crown like head of spikes (a nod to the fallen red Queen). I've drawn her as an empowered woman, with a staff that hints to a back story to intrigue. Also some subtle design choices such as her collar framing her head which controls her Wonderland which may or may not all be imaginary. This also resembles a mental dominance.

Here is a concept for the 'Land of Wonder'.

Alice overlooks as she puts together a physical vision of her mental state.

As you can see this came on quite a bit in between designs. This was just a VERY quick scribble to get the vision down on paper. I drew her with white hair because of inspiration from 'Alice Madness Returns' and the contrast to her traditional dark hair (apart from the disney iteration) and obvious age.

School Talks

A while back I did an animation talk for my friends sister who teaches at a primary school for kids with blurry faces. Very fulfilling teaching interested kids how to draw and amazing how much they understood about animation! Especially in this industry we're going to have to sprint to keep up with the new generation who have always had the internet, mind-blowing CGI and computer knowledge!

Charity Art Auction

Charity Art Auction

Here is a scan of a painting I did (with shiny acrylic paint!) of an elderly woman using off colours to hint at different ethnicities and colours of the world as the auction was based around 'World Art'.

The auction was to raise money for sexual health help overseas.

Mythological Creature: Birdtroll

 This project was to create a mythological creature. For inspiration I started with a quick sketch as I decided to do a kind of snow troll. I drew half of it and flipped it, then by accident I noticed new shapes at different stages of intersecting the two images and made a few varying concepts with these new shapes.

For example, this image is the same as the top one just the two halves are crossing over at different points. This seemed to create a kind of banshee/troll face with huge eyebrows. I love creating creatures from the game 'scribble' so this actually came in handy.

I altered the design by adding in a proper body. For some reason the 'Chupacabra' came to mind so I kept this in mind when thinking about textures. 

 This is how the model looked in 3DS max

This is before I subdivided the model in Zbrush to export and gain an understanding of normal maps...

This is the high poly model (seperate from the wings) with a lovely material on it I just thought looked cool. Making this beast slightly odd in the texture became attractive at this point.

I decided to paint the creature in Zbrush inspired by Mexican Pinata.

The Normals maps didn't work so well because of the over altered shape in comparrison to the final design. However I didnt have much knowlege of Zbrush in relation to Max at this point.

Zbrush wing. The normals taken from this showed up a hell of a lot more than the main creature because of the fine bumpy texture.

Final model in 3DS Max. I learnt a lot from my mistakes in this project but even today I have much to learn about the practical applications of Zbrush tools. However this did ignite a love for the Zbrush software...

Vehicle Design: Desert Fox

Quick thumbs for a vehicle project. I decided to go for a vehicle for traveling on sand...

I played with the idea of using drill mechanisms for movement.

I personally liked this vehicle the most, based on a desert beetle, however it needs a few tweaks for practicality...

The top design came out on top in a vote so I decided to develop it further. My lecturer suggested I add treads to the front but this started me racking my brains thinking about the practicality.

Here is the final design for what I called 'The Desert Fox'
The design changed a lot from the schematics after I experimented with wheel placement and practical tweaks in 3D with a few mockups.
Overall I am very happy with this and learnt a lot about rendering in the process.
I used Vray to achieve this and I completely love it, I also used ambient occlusion which makes a hell of a difference!