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!

Character Design

'The Adventures of 'Buck Lao'

This is a game about a boy from a city in the clouds and was great fun playing with the idea and designing levels. I drew him on flash for ease of animation and easy vector drawing. I drew him wearing blue clothes as a prophecy to him returning to the sky and golden hair to represent the sun and the gold his city was made from.

Here are two levels I designed with a Blue/Purple theme to differentiate the atmosphere from other levels and give them an identity. these two levels would be played in the order they appear and would be in the 'Descent' section...

This was a game I did an absolute ton of work for, but as it turns out my game engineer didn't start putting the game together until the day before it had to be handed in, so yeah...it didn't work and didn't even have 1 level. Kind of put me off working in a team altogether, or at least relying on anyone but myself.

These are some thumbnails for my low poly character model, all pretty varied. From feedback I concluded that the top left was most well received. I love drawing with white on a black background, I find it so easy to build shapes with highlights.

Here is a turnaround of the same character, however I had to get rid of the spikes on his boots after feedback from my lecturer about practicality, although I still think they wouldn't really be a hindrance...
I also needed to adjust the sizes of certain areas like the head.

Here is the my first final 3D character in 3DS Max. I rigged this character and took a few renders in different positions. Nowadays I would obviously do a better job with textures particularly in the armour with specular maps and materials.

Environment Design

'Chippy Lane' in Cardiff, this took me a full day!
I'm not 100% sure but I much prefer realising character in artwork rather than just replicating structures. However it did get me thinking about how I can add character to a building in my designs and the theory behind it, like how I would make a building seem intimidating or quaint.

Here are a few thumbnails to get some Ideas on paper (or photoshop?)

I thought it would be interesting to create a world where the sun had become a red giant, but Earth had the technology to survive with the use of a global forcefield and towers mounting ‘Graviton cannons’ all over the Earths’ crust which enabled space travel free of orbit. 

This would mean the earth would be a very different place relying on renewable oxygen supply facilities and colonies. From research into this idea it soon became obvious to have a theme based on spheres because of planetary travel.

I decided to create an interior 'Graviton command centre'. However this was a bit over ambitious with my technical limitations. The place was absolutely huge aswell!

I thought up the idea based on the machine from 'Event Horizon', one of my favorite films. It fired graviton particles and created a black hole in which the spaceship could pass through to succeed in faster than light travel through space.

I got a book detailing the artwork behind the film 'Dark Crystal' and it had an observatory which inspired me to create some sort of engine room/command centre.

College Showreel

A collection of many projects I did throughout my 2 years at college studying Interactive Media with Game Design.

I got a D*, D,D so very happy with that, and it came at a time I needed the confidence...
Those are Distinctions by the way not the whole ABCD grading system...and one of them has a star on it...yeah boy!

"Watch Out Wolf"

My first animation using Cinema 4D.
This was based on a strange dream I had about an Albino kid staring at me...and this is where my mascot came from. I call him 'Albi' and the other character with a round head is called 'Rex'.

Most of my ideas come from dreams, I have very intense and immersive dreams with plot twists and everything! I have many dreams written down that I plan on making into films or adapting into my course in the near future...

Frank: After Donnie Darko

Here's a film I directed with a few friends back in college. It is about Frank from Donnie Darko after his appearance in the film...things didn't go so well for him.
We filmed this all around Bristol, unfortunately some of the shots came out quite a bit darker than they appeared on the camera, but with post production we couldn't adjust the brightness without it looking a bit naff.

Doodles (AKA: Blokes)

Much to the annoyance of my school teachers, my books were always full of more doodles than schoolwork...

Doodles are great fun for me, I find they all express certain characteristics of myself. Particularly as I never know what they are or how they're going to end up when I start them...

I don't even know...these guys always have a strange physiology, I guess this was expressing some naivety when talking to girls pissed...

Wouldn't want to bump into this thing ever...

This bloke is probably the most long lasting part of my personality...this makes me fed up...

Gotta love the puns...

I noticed how many of my blokes were blokes...so here's a bloke who's not a bloke

Yeah I don't really know where this one came from... I have a bit of a surreal side.

If you liked these check out more blokes in the link below!

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Quest-for-the-Holy-Doodle/184963888312016?sk=photos_stream

The Magic Paintbrush

Here is my first animation using Adobe Flash.
I got on really well with this and loved just directing myself. It was a great tool to let loose with and bring some of these doodles to life.
This is based on an old Chinese tale about a boy with a magic paintbrush...I took a few libertys with the story and made it more heroic...

Van: First 3DS Max Model

This was my first 3DS Max model. This was textured using photos. However it is just my first go so there's a hell of a lot of ways this can be improved with both texturing and modelling. Such as modelling from the same van as the photos were taken from, stretching and fitting the textures were a bit of a...stretch.
Also the UV map could have been more thought out sizing-wise to achieve optimal resolution with the textures.

Tunnel Snakes

As a end of year project a few of us got together to create a game around the theme of 'flourish'.
This game was a collaboration project between Game Art and Game Enterprise.

This game was going to be a 2D mobile game where a raindrop would grow in mass whilst dodging obstacles as it falls from the sky and makes plant life on ledges grow and convert the water mass into points.

This was a point scoring arcade game. Unfortunately it only worked for a short while down to time constraints with the Enterprise students...

Very Low Poly atrium

This is a very early building project. I modelled the Atrium (my university).
However because of tight poly limitations I had to leave out some sections. Also my photos I used for textures could have been very much improved, but with such a massive building it was very hard to get the optimal perspective...