Final Environment works, and whats next for the project.

Frozen Environment final

Goblin Coastal City Environment final

Tundra Environment final

Vale Environment final

Volcanic Environment final

Here are the final version of my environments, in high resolution. I went over each one after a final round of feedback. As can be seen many are significantly different in terms of rendering.

In the Frozen environment I have tried to make the foreground much more prominent and the snow rendered in a way that better represents the texture of snow. In the previous version the snow looked too gloopy, almost like icecream rather than snow. I found having a more diffuse look to the surface lighting and working in various cool colours and surround local colours significantly improved how much it looked like actual snow.

For the Goblin Costal city I have mostly improved the rendering, the water nearest to the pipe and oil station receiving the complete repaint to better indicate the direction of the seas movement and the natural way the toxic waste may interact with the water. I have also added some smoke from the chiney of the house for movement and to compliment the composition as well as the minor effect of adding a bit of local depth to that area.

Further to this I have flipped the top of the oil platform horizontally in order to keep the viewer in the painting as before it was pointing outwards. Ive done a similar thing with the rocks and the land in the foreground in order to enhance the flow of the composition.

In the tundra environment, and vale environment the focus was on rendering the focal points and improving the way the water was rendered. I have completely repainted the water in the tundra environment to look more natural which I believe is a significant improvement. Also in this painting I realised their was a weird elevation error so I have tried to address that by adding steps almost to the rocks giving a better sense of travelling upwards.

Lastly the Volcanic Environment has had the entire foreground lava repainted and the values changed in order to add more depth to the piece, and to again make various elements look more realistic. The lava I believe is much more lava like in appearance, before it was a bit too abstract.

My focus now for the project will be creating a poster and presentation for Expotees. The poster will be a representation of the methodology for the project, its the first time I have done an academic poster but they look pretty straight forward so I am confident it will not take long; and having kept this blog I have a complete representation of my methodology already, which I believe has shown the usefulness of having kept one during this project.

The report is currently in its second draft, I think after adding corrections it will be done. As such the project is essentially on track for the hand in and I will hopefully have enough time after Expotees to also do a final pass on the characters similar to what I have done with the environments. 

 

Final environment touch ups and Murloc trash mob final designs

Tundra environment final touches

Vale environment final touches

Murloc welder, Dungeon 1, Trash mob 1

Murloc engineer, Dungeon 1, Trash mob 1

I received feedback from my tutor that I needed to render the rocks and water as they did not look finished in 2 of my environments, so I took the opportunity to give both paintings above another once over, I think these are the finals now.

I also forgot to post the two 'trash' mob designs in my last post. They are both meant to be Murloc minions, ones a Engineer of sorts and the other a Welder. The idea is that they look like they perform an actual role in the dungeon, I feel this adds to the believability and story of the characters. Which in tern makes them more interesting.

One the aspects I have taken away from this project is the need to think of a back story and context when creating characters, I feels it has really helped me to create interesting looking characters as opposed to previous character works I have done which can sometimes look rather derivative or not as interesting as they could be.

Final Environments, Underground Cavern, and weapon designs

Final underground dungeon

Vale Environment final

Tundra Environment final

Volcanic Environment final

First Dungeon, weapon drop designs

First Dungeon, 3 weapon final designs

Here are the final versions of the Vale Environment, Tundra Environment, and the Volcanic Environment. Finally I decided to do one of my bonus tasks where I designed weapons for the first dungeon that would drop from bosses.

For the designs I wanted them to seem like they belong in the dungeon, and also that they could have been used by the characters in the dungeon. I thought of 3 classes as well when designing them, the dagger is meant for a Rogue, the gun like object below it is a welding tool which I thought could be a like a short range gun for a hunter, and the object to the right is meant to be a cattle prod type wand that the shaman uses to keep the workers in line, this weapon would be used be Warlocks/Shamans/Mages etc

As mentioned earlier on in the blog I was using the site CGhub in order to post my work and gain feedback, unfortunately due to their abrupt shut down earlier this week I have lost that data so will no longer be able to use it for my final report.

Edit: Forgot to post my frozen environment final as well.

Frozen Environment final

Dungeon character designs update

Taskmaster mini boss final design

Trash and special character types mob designs

Hob Goblin Enforcer Special mob design

Hobgoblin Shaman special mob final design

Final boss design thumb sketches

Final dungeon one boss design

Here are the designs for my first dungeon characters. The first design is a taskmaster mini boss, secondly I have done thumbnails for possible trash mob and special type mob designs, this resulted in the Hobgoblin shaman and hobgoblin enforcer. I chose Hobgoblins as they were listed in the Warcraft law as be subserviants to Goblins in some cases so I felt they would be appropriate for the special mob type designs.

For the main boss I wanted to have a Goblin in a Harvester suit to continue along the same design as other Goblin bosses in that they have technological improvements in order to make them more formidable. In this case I wanted the harvester type suit to look like it may be used in the factory like setting of the first dungeon, perhaps to pick of heavy objects.

In terms of rendering I plan to go back and give everything a once over like I will be doing with the environments.

I have taken a weeks break during the project as I have been doing an art test for a potential job after the course. This art test has actually influenced the Hobgoblin Shaman and Final dungeon boss design process, as I did a tight line drawing first, blocking in the drawing with a mask colour, adding the local colours, and then doing a shadow, light, and highlight pass. I have found this leads to a much more consistent quality of artwork and is much quicker to produce presentable results with.

I will be using this method for the rest of the project as I feel it is helping to me to create the right balance between quantity and quality.

Underground cavern design progress, Goblin Taskmaster mini boss development

Taskmaster mini boss head sketches

Taskmaster Gaz'lan wip

Here is the start of my first dungeon boss designs, for the previously posted geothermal power plant themed dungeon.

To start the designs off I decided that I would design the head of the character first, as I have found previously that an interestingly designed head can make designing the rest of the character easier.For this boss I have gone with the idea of a taskmaster of slaves - who will be the trash mobs I design later, this boss would be a mini-boss that you would fight on the way to the main dungeon boss.

When looking at the designs for previous Goblin bosses and named enemy npcs in warcraft they always tend to be designed with machinery enhancements to make them seem more of a threat. With this in mind I started sketching some kind of gun like weapon that attaches the Goblins right arm, with a whip in the other to link to the task master job he fulfils.

I am think about the types of attacks, and abilities he would use against players whilst designing which helps flesh out the design. For instance the whip being use to stun a random player, and the gun being used for a rapid fire attack of some sort, and the deadly one hit attacks that many bosses have in the game.

At the moment I just have the bust of the character as the initial sketch I did of the character had his legs posed in a way that didnt quite work. Once I have finished designing and have rendered this character I am planning to design two trash mobs that a player would fight in the dungeon and then move on to a final boss design for the dungeon.

I have also done some more work on the underground section of the power plant that would act as a second dungeon. I hope to flesh this out further after I have done the designs mentioned above.

Underground cavern dungeon designs and the entrance to the dungeon

Value/lighting rough

Edit: Here is is a quick rough of the basic 3/4 lighting I am planning to do and I have also given him legs now.

First Dungeon cut out, and initial wip of second dungeon

Dungeon thumbnails

The image are the thumbnail designs for my first dungeon. I knew from the beggining that I wanted to have some kind of Goblin factory.

In second image are the cut out designs I did for my first dungeon idea, which is meant to be a Goblin geothermal power plant of some sort which would be found in the volcanic zone I posted previously. The first cut out is the main room, the second cut out is the first room you would see when going into to the dungeon, and the third is the right wing of the dungeon. I built all of these as very quick 3D models in order to find an interesting but clear angle to show the design of the dungeon.

My goal with the dungeon design was to allow for lots of different areas to explore and to make them as non-linear as possible whilst avoiding 'dead ends' which require the players to go back to another area after clearing one. I feel this leads to a more interesting flow in terms of the level design and makes the concept drawings more interesting to draw as a result.

Whilst I was doing a quick map for this area I started adding a collapsed area to the dungeon which lead to an underground cavern filled with other creatures and bosses. I thought it would be interesting if this would be my second dungeon and you can see the initial sketches for these above.

For the initial dungeon designs I have designed the dungeon first, and then I am planing to the design the bosses and creatures etc that inhabit it. I actually think this was a mistake to do as I feel the dungeons would have evolved into more interesting areas if I had based them around the a few characters i,e the bosses for that dungeon. I think I will do this for my third dungeon and then compare my thoughts on the two in my final report on the two methods and their results as part of my final report.

My undeground cavern designs I did as more of a traditional concept piece like my previous environment shots, and then I tried mixing the cutout look in the 3rd picture which is intended to depict the entrance to this new instanced off dungeon. I feel this is a much more artistically pleasing to look at, but perhaps it isnt as practical for designers to build from as alot of information is left up to the imagination and as such is better for inspiring further designs than to be used as the final blueprint design for the dungeon.

I believe for this project I should be focusing on the initial stages of preproduction where the concept artist is brought into inspire further designs, so the cut-out look I have gone for above probably would have been okay for a later stage of development but not for the preproduction stage I should be concentrating on at this point in the development cycle.

Development for the final sets of zone environment concepts

Frozen Environment

Recently submerged environment

Goblin Coastal environment thumbs

Goblin Coastal environment

Volcanic valley thumbs

Volcanic environment

Here are the last of the environment concepts for my final project. At this point I think going forward I will further develop my concepts around the volcanic environment, Goblin coastal environment, and the first environment I did of the country vale.

I will go back and clean up all of these environments later on in the project, for now I feel I need to move on to the dungeon designs and related concepts and that these are at the stage where enough information is present to build upon.