Tired of hard-surface, sci-fi stuff I spent today playing around... what If Vlad the Impaler/Dracula was a Celt and took down the Romans instead of the Turks?
I've been wanting to design a Celtic Vampire for a while now, I think I may do another iteration or so, if you have any crit feel free to let me know!
Morgan taught me things when I was in Montpellier
https://www.artstation.com/artist/morganyon
This past week I have had some great feedback and critique on the project. Unfortunately this all points to something I was expecting but not hoping for... Start the display level again.
This is not as big a deal as it seems like and it will definitely benefit me in the long run. The pace has (touch wood) ramped up to a good level of productivity and with Elliott's tools (below) building environments and display levels shouldn't take long at all. The thing I'm worried about is then refining, adjusting and finishing the new environment to a state of polish that I'm happy with but... third time lucky!
First paintover
Current state of the environment
Horrible, noisey paintover, I can do better
Jolyon Webb who lectured at DMU a bit last year came to see us from Natural Motion and gave Elliott and I both a lot of critique and valuable thinking points.
Overall Critique:
- The entire environment doesn't feel consistent and grounded.
- Scale is difficult to determine
- The clutter will sell the scale of the near by stuff but the distance vista needs a scale indicator
- Cliff detail and adjusting the atmospheric fog is going to be important.
- Cliff assets aren't working, look at West Bay cliffs (colossal, strata to help sell scale)
- Reference Victorian Harbours for the next iteration of the environment. (Chatham docks)
- More interesting elements with the pipes, Walkways? Siphoning/hacking into pipes?
- Lighting is flat and uninteresting.
I have a couple of ideas for a different layout. After being told to look at Victorian harbours and Chatham docks I found a couple of interesting images that could potentially take advantage of the factory elements I have made. I have also been thinking for a while about creating a domestic street scene with the road being taken over by the slum buildings and the vista elements visable through tarpaulin and cables above the player.
Start of redesigns
An hour of craziness with our tools, kind of showing that they work how we want but I can do better
Looking at some more interesting lighting and composition.particularly liking the bottom 2.
Meanwhile Elliott made a short video to display where his end of the project is.
Finally having some fun in substance painter and getting near final assets into the level, I just finished this barrier, I'm not happy enough to call it finished, there is much to fix and adjust with it but going to leave it until I compile some critique on it.
Rich got me some birthday feedback from some of the people at Creative Assembly...
Problem Areas:
- Composition! Rework it.
- Laptop... its the focal point and its not working as well as everything else...
- More interesting shapes, less macbook more old school laptop
- Velcro (white blobs on the box at the top) would be better as story elements, stickers, notes, maybe a small prop
- Anodized blue boxes aren't high enough detail for the amount of attention they draw
- Re-work grunge on window
- Planet in the background
- Colour palette needs to be balanced a bit
- Add the blue fabric bag in the top right of the image that's in the reference image
- General grunge
I baked myself a cake as a break from FMP and ISS... hehe
