Monday, January 25, 2010

Quick Zbrush Update:

About half-way through the first zbrush pass. Still have to work out a few logistics. . .

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Onwards to Science!

Well, I'll probably end up doing some more concepts for the environment, but for the time-being, I have some time to work on the Scientist character. He's a sort of quirky mix of Doc Brown and Einstein with a little Kramer in there as well. Here are a few concepts as well as a quick Zbrush rough for proportions / anatomy:

First concept:

An ortho-sketch:

Rough in 3DSMax:

Rough after some Zbrushing:

Environment Concepts:

Well, through some strange series of events, I wound up being the primary environment concept artist for the project during pre-production. I don't consider this to be my strong suite, but you gotta do what you gotta do. Anyway, here is a sort of 'rough' outline of what the game environments will look like, starting from the boy's house and leading into the rift-wild:

Right outside the boy's bedroom the house begins to fall apart:


Finding it quite impossible to get out of the house the conventional way, our hero finds himself in this strange cave/house hybred after going through a coat closet:


At the end of the cave stands the unlikely front door to the boy's house. There is no reason why it should be where it is, it just is. Out beyond is the great unknown rift-wild:


Outside for the first time, the boy's sidewalk is rapidly falling away and the environment is replaced by strange floating islands. To the boy's left is a strange glowing device that is almost in reach:


After falling through the Aether (the energy dimension) our hero finds himself on an island full of strange and wonderful sights:

Rift Has Begun:

Well, after about two weeks of pre-production on two different projects, the vote finally came around last Tuesday. The class democratically decided to work on a project called Rift. Rift is a sort of surreal / fantasy / sci-fi platform /adventure game that follows a young boy through some rather strange events. Long story short, scientists from another dimension have discovered another dimension full of pure energy and created a device to harvest that energy. Unfortunately, somewhere during the initial testing of the harvester, the membrains of the dimensions became unstable and eventually shattered, creating a multi-demensional rift. It just so happens that this Rift opens right outside the house of our protagonist (the young boy). The Rift-wild is a surreal, strange mish-mash of our reality and the other dimension's reality.

For the scope of the team project, we hope to finish the first chapter in the story, which would involve the young boy finding one of the surviving scientists who worked on the device and getting back to the device. At this point, the device would suck both the scientist and the young boy into god only knows where, ending our project with a cliffhanger of sorts.

If we were somehow able to make the whole game, it would involve the boy trying to help the scientist repair the device and restore the dimensions. Throughout the game, more dimensions would get sucked into the Rift and new dangerous dimensions would threaten the future of the entire universe.

Since I have been studying mostly character design in my time at SCAD, I will be working mostly on characters. However, in our team is the very talented Leng who is also a character designer. As we only have two major characters for the scope of this project, I will stick to the scientist character and Leng will work on the main boy character.

If all goes according to plan, Leng and I should be done with our characters around week 7 and be able to help the other teammates with any left over asset modeling and texturing.

Stay tuned for art updates and the like!

B.S