This is the final render of the scene, I never make or design environments, so this project was very difficult for me as I'm no really use to painting or designing environments. However, by using megascans and photobashing it had made the overall process much easier than if I wasn't allowed to use this technique.
After finding a good composition and cool lighting I started to use Megascans, this is a quick and efficient way of building a level really quickly, I found all the objects from my initial 3D block out and placed them in here, now I will paint over this which will make things a lot easier and quicker. I'm happy with how the scene turned out and happy with the objects that I have in this scene.
After I put the 3D mesh into an engine to start messing around with the lighting, I found one lighting that I really enjoyed and liked also taking inspiration from one of the reference images I gathered, after I set up the lighting properly I took a screenshot and put it into photoshop just to enhance some shadows and lights to the point where i'm happy with it. As the engines have realistic lighting and I just want to cherry-pick some areas to enhance without changing the entire environments setting.
After changing my initial idea I wanted to start doing the sketches and start designing, however when I started I was unable to get any good inspirations or should I say it was very difficult to come up with any good ideas, it was also taking me long than I preferred just to finished one design, so I decided to make some designs in 3D.
These are some of the designs I came up with, after looking and evaluating these designs I feel like I was overthinking this and making it more complicated than necessary.
This is the sketch I came up with before doing my final render, I picked and pulled different design ideas from all of my other notan designs, initially I wanted to include the belt strap on the entire body however after drawing it in and thinking about it, it was not every suited for the theme of this character or the setting of the environment he will be in. So I decided to remove that in the end it also allows me to put more focus and detail on the body which I want. This gives me more room to put more stories on the body itself with scratches and scars. As I said initially I want to emphasize the weakness of the character through his physical appearance by showing how skinny he was and just by the overall stand of the character.
The overall body shape of this character is slightly hunched over and this is because of the metal arm lock on his forearms, I really enjoy this idea of using what is chaining him down as a way of attacking, I have seen similar ideas in dark souls and bloodborne where the way the boss is swinging its weapon in a way that feels like it's really heavy and weighing them down.
The head on the body is just for placeholder purposes, I may or may not change my idea on which design I want to use.
These are the silhouette that I came up with for both body shapes, for all these silhouettes I wanted to focus more on the uniqueness of these rather than the quantity of it.
I really like the one with the hammer as one of the hand, I feel like this really adds a lot of interest to the character overall. This was carried over to the skinny character silhouette with the one with the blade.
This is the 3 body type I came up with after collecting my reference, I firstly did the fat and skinny one and then I drew one that is somewhere in the middle.
After some thinking I decided to abandon the middle body shape as it doesn't really look unique and as extreme as the other 2 therefore I will only take the other 2 into further development.
For now I, only the slightest, prefer the bigger body shape as I feel like is more intimidating and more interesting. Further more I also feel like I can make it more interesting.
After the inital idea was rejected I had to come up with a different idea, so I had to quickly go back brain storming again, and when watching athe game Sekiro there wasa fight with the chained up ogre as it's shown in my moodboard and that gave me a really interesting idea.
My new idea that I came up with was this chained up ogre giant in either a church, abandonded hosue or tarven, and becasue he is chained up there is a limited amount of space he can move around this means there will be a clear border of where his limit is and I can convey this easily by battle damage, skeletons, dead bodies and etc.
The lore of this ogre is he was a slave of this family but he was abused and tortured and when the family either died or moved away he was just abandoned here in the house still chained up, and over the years of being tortured and being alone and locked up in a house with nothing but his own thoughts, his hatred towards humans began to grow more and more. With this hatred he will kill any human that is unlucky enough to cross path with him.
I want this scene to set in the theme of Bloodborne, gothic victorian, and Dark Soul.
This was my initial moodboard, my initial idea that I had was to do a voodoo witch environment, however while I was collecting reference images and creating this moodboard I was brainstorming what i want to include in my scene and very quickly I ran into a lot of road blocks, a huge struggle I ran into was where my scene will be set in, I thought of a lot of different ideas such as: Cave, Swamp, Forest, etc. However non of those scene seem to fit, it all seemed a little bit off, another problem I had was what can I do to make the scene feel like a voodoo witch scene, and again things i thought about all seem to be a little bit off and overall the feeling was very weak, I was not very confident in excuting this idea very well due to the weak initial idea.
This is the final render of my final vehicle, there are some changes that I have made from my final sketch and my final render.
One of the biggest changes i have made was the grill guard I drew in my final drawing was removed, this was because I tried to add in the grill guard however it just looks very off and stretches therefore I just removed it entirely. Also I removed it because I feel like it was blocking the engine even it it is just a little bit.
I also reduced the size of the exhaust pipes and made it thinner as I it looked very cartoony when I made it thick.
This is my final design for my vehicle, out of all the ones I have, I feel like this one fits with what I want the most.
Taking inspiration from the references I collected, I made the entire front of the car as an huge engine, previously I was leaning more towards having the engine at the back of the car, however this was quickly scratched as if the engine was at the back then this will create an imbalance of focal points, as the whole focus of the car will be at the back of the car with the tank track and engine both being at the back, this leaves the front looking very boring and as I mentioned in my previous blog if I want to make the front interesting i'll have to add a lot of accessories which is not what I want. Therefore, I decided to have the engine at the front of the car.
When looking and finding my references I found this very interesting design, where there is this vertical oval at the front of the car and I really liked this idea as it was clearly inserted at the front of the car but it fits so perfectly.
Overall, i'm really happy with this design as I feel like this meets all the requirements of my apocalypse theme and also convey the type of car I intend this to be. Having this huge engine in the front I won't add too much accessories onto the car as due to the size of the engine alone is enough to make the entire front of the car have enough interest, and the interest of the car at the back of the car will be the tank tracks, as is just tank tracks it won't be too over powering the engine but also adding a reasonable amount of interest at the back.
These are the designs I came up with for my vehicles, during this stage I really tried to keep the nature of my apocalypse in mind and to restrain my self from doing designs too off theme, and it was proven to be difficult. However keeping the the cause of my apocalypse in mind I was able to come up with some very interesting ideas.
The main idea of my vehicle is that is more of a scout car, so it has to be fast and have accelerate quickly, on top of that it will have to power the weight of the huge tank tracks for it's back wheel, so with that in mind I want the engine of this car to, maybe not the selling point, to also stand out, and the best way to do that was to do a external engine somewhere, just so you feel the weight of the car but also you can see the engine but also understand that it need this huge engine to power it.
During the design process as well I wanted to add different "accessories" but I had to choose very carefully as I have to think that it will indeed add weight to the car in general, so I couldn't go all out on those either as I don't want this too look like a tank car as it is not the nature or the point of this car, furthermore, by adding too much accessories on the car will make it look heavy, which is also a bad idea as the point of this car is to look fast.
After deciding on what era thiswill be roughly set in I wanted to decide what vehicle I wanted to make it as my base model that I will be drawing on.
After some searching i have decided to do either a 1967 Mustang or a 1997 BMW 850Ci. The reason I chose these 2 carsis because they are a classical super/muscle cars.
I really like the Mustang becasue it's got a classic grill, the long back with the roof of the car curving down slowly. The other thing that really makes me like this Mustangis those silver lines created on the vehicle with metal around the girll, window and wind shield.
Before I put this board together I came up with my main reason for the cause of this apacolypse which is human sized rats/rodent, which will set the direction of my board before I even started it, even if it's a very vague direction. Before the rat idea there was another idea of Wendigos but i felt like conveying a Wendigo apocolypse through a vehicle was a lot more diffcult compared to Rats.
After the Rats idea have been decided the next thing I was focused on was the time period of which this was set in, as a personal perference I really enjoy the look of old cars specially around the 1970-90's therefore I have set my time period around that time.
Later I diceded to do some reasearch on what real world rats were afraid of, lots of the results I got was all smell based and i feel like that can be very difficult to convey on a vehicle, and then I dug deeper and found that rats are scared of very bright lights and especially flashing lights.
I got the tank track idea from the fact that Rats dig holes, and becasue the size of these rats which is human sized the holes they'll dig will be massive so the tank tracks will act like a counter to that to prevent the vehicle being stuck.
Then I went to collect some reference from Mad Max as they have some very interesting and exaggerated DIY'd vehicles that I can take insporations from whether is the weapons or the actual changes to the car body.
These are the coloured media with black media, I chose the do the male and female separately so I can focus on each individual drawings ...
