Monday 10 March 2014

The Marauders Cometh

The one thing we felt we were lacking before the presentation was a strong environment piece to sell the playable level. Based on the cave concepts, very much like the 'Locust' from the 'Gears of War' franchised, we thought that the marauders could dwell beneath the ground and burst up from the concrete. This was the presence for my next concept.


I wanted to experiment blocking out a composition using 3D in Maya, and producing a paintover. These skills may also come in handy later in the development phase, when we start blocking out the virtual spaces in Maya and Unity. Feng Zhu discusses above that a large part of his client work involves receiving blocked out 3D spaces with the request of them being made into production pieces.
Below is my blocked out space.


I wanted an open feeling, so tried to design a town square. The block nearest the foreground represents where the Mech will be in the shot. The next phase was to mark out the perspective:


I brought in phototextures again to lay down the values quickly. Below is the finished piece:


The beaming red light shooting up from the ground hints that a threat is approaching. With the architecture, I included old pub buildings, however, one criticism from the group was that the buildings felt too nondescript. As a production piece however, we were able to include this in the presentation to give a sense of the how the playable level will feel for space. Notice also that I included a billboard with the words 'consume' written boldly alongside a winking cartoon face. I was thinking that with the billboards we could play on the ideas of this military industrial complex we see in society. The theory that in times of war, western consumerism heightens giving a false sense of security. There is big profit to be made in conflict, and instead of looking at war as a glorious and heroic feat, I feel in our game we could almost poke fun at the mentality of it all. While blood is being shed, we can display up-beat conflicting advertisements telling us that war is necessary, consume and don't think too hard about it.

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