Week Twenty

This Monday marked the start of our final assignment - Off the Map. For this, we were each put into groups of around 5 or 6, and tasked with creating a level/environment set within the theme of one of 3 specially selected Shakespeare works: The Tempest, Macbeth, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. I chose The Tempest as I thought that it would have the most interesting set pieces, and was grouped with Adam Topor, Anthony Moxham, Brandon Duffy, Damian Joseph and Harry Fordham. We had also been given the opportunity to express our preferred role in the production of the the level (environment, engine work, concepts etc.) - I myself, having just finished a successful character project, chose concepting and characters, and so naturally became the the character concept artist! That said, we still needed ideas for the level itself, and so as you'll see below, I ended up doing an environment piece this week.

New life drawing model this week! At first this was refreshing change-up from usual, but also a bit of a learning curve, as I'd grown used to having the same person to draw for over a year. That said, we took a dive into new territory - super long pose durations! This proved to be right up my alley, as you may know that I am a bit of a perfectionist and quite a slow worker when on the spot. The left-most image could be one of my best life drawing sketches this term due to the likeness alone - I've mentioned before that I almost always begin with the face and find it hard to move on until I deem it acceptable, but here the extra time meant that this all worked out fine and dandy. Also notice how I've used very few lines to simply "suggest" the fingers, which I find has worked very well here. Our warm-up drawings (right) were are "continuous line" ones, which I often dread. The result of these are certainly never my best work, but I guess it is a good way to quickly gage the shape and size of the different aspects.

Here's my environment concept - a mixture of photo bashing and painting, depicting the damaged ship and the island where the wizard resides, as well as potential weather and lighting for the level. This took a while to piece together in Photoshop, and I stuck to using the median filter to give it a more atmospheric feel. So far we're pretty sure that the level is going start out emerging from the ship into a vast cove area - other areas, such as caves may also be an option too, but this is more a concept for the general feel of the scene, and if we do choose to include caves, we may want to consider making the other areas brighter for some diversity of colour and tone. However, if we go ahead with the stormy weather depicted here, lightning bolts should be relatively easy to create in engine with the use of 2D planes, which quickly appear and dissapear.