Finished pieces

Back to the shadows

The mesh for the character is ready, now it just needs a skin and an environment. I'm getting back to the 3d shadow idea. The idea is that the dynamic pose reveals enough of the detail on the mesh and the rest will be highlighted by painting them out of the black skin.

Character

Because the magical lake lies under a desert, the folk must have adapted to high temperatures and long distances. Desert animals are skinny and have some kind of a cooling system to keep waterloss to minimum.

http://truthpraiseandhelp.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/camel2.jpg

Camels have long skinny legs and wide feet.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-05/14/xinsrc_432050614130414004951.jpg

And so do jerboas. Though jerboas jump and camels walk.

My character is this humanoid that lives in the desert. They're friendly and peaceful and can run really fast to catch food or something. They also wear some kind of masks because the sun has gotten harsher lately. There's some kind of a global warming kicking about, which also explains why they're so dependent on the magical lake.

I was also thinking about making the character big ears like the jerboa. Jerboas like many other desert animals have big ears for cooling. The large areas of thin skin cool the blood when it circles through in the earlobes. Big ears will also make the creature less scary.

The character has long arms even though it's not very efficient for running. However humans and monkeys are the only ones with long arms and fingers. This type of animals are the smartest ones in the world so giving the character the ability to build things with his arms makes him "more humanlike" and smarter.

The anatomy is a mix of humans and dinosaurs.

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/resources/nature-online/life/dinosaurs/dino-directory/colour/src/Chindesaurus.jpg

 

Black lake pt 2

I had a look through these:

And decided to make a tower in the middle of the lake and even got quite far with it:

The idea is that there's some kind of a building in the middle of the lake and it's getting covered with vegetation and somebody's trying to repair it. However there's something I don't like about it and I can't quite come up with a good story for it.

So I came across these:

 

http://www.criteriondg.info/wordpress/uploads/scott-wills.jpg

and thought I could make a dome where the opening of the lake is. I was struggling to figure out how to make a believable rock mesh.

Devil's causeway in Ireland has these six angled basalt towers. Because they sit next to one another perfectly if I can just make one and and make a nice composition of its uv mapped duplications. I get away with minimum uv mapping and the whole scene will be easy to manage.

I can't really draw this out so I've been sketching on maya.

It's still very rought but proves my point. The six angle blocks look believable and give the scene a nice surreal touch.

Black lake

My environment idea is making the lake that the grabmobiles explore. The lake is sort of a God for the creatures living around it, kind of like the Mathmos in Barbarella. In the movie the Mathmos is a lake underneath the city. The lake is pure energy in liquid form.

The Black lake is powerful and must be nursed to keep it happy. The submarines explore the lake to make sure there's nothing wrong. Most of the lake is underground and it looks black due to lack of light. The submarines are also black so they wouldn't disturb the lake.

I'm making the entrance to the lake. The lake is in the middle of a desert in some kind of a strange canyon.

http://www.destination360.com/north-america/us/utah/images/s/bryce-canyon-area.jpg

http://science.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Shared/StaticFiles/Science/Images/Content/glen-canyon-999420-sw.jpg

Deserts have some beautiful and very distinctive colours and light. It's all blue and orange.

http://www.jon.hinchliffe.name/graphics/rd%20arches-1morning.jpg

This one sort of explains my texture idea for the submarine:

http://www.strangemilitary.com/images/content/138621.jpg

Crabmobile

I was trying to model the jellyfish thing by making plates that would fit together. However the model just didn't look that nice and trying to fit the different plates next to eachother was really difficult. I did some studies with different sea creatures and came up with this oyster/calmar design:

So I've made the sideplates:

I just need to figure out the cockpit:

I'm going witt something like the second one. This one was just made quickly out of a sphere and it isn't that polygon efficient or even that nice. However what I do like about it is how it looks kind of like you mixed something very organic into a machine.

What I still have to figure out as well is the backside. Like in the original sketch it has a couple of plates there as well. However they still need some fitting because to me this just looks really random at the moment.

I also need to concider the textures. This is some kind of a deepwater submarine/stealth ship. I'm thinking of making it all in black and making the shape come out with light/lighter bits like in my original idea.

Jellyfish-crab-submarine

http://alecrios.com/img/gd/41.gif

I found this picture and I started thinking about the shape of a rose. After some logic thinking it turned into this:

The plane idea didn't work out after all so I'm going to do this. Obviously I have to cut down on the detail because I don't think my modelling skills are up to that just yet. Anyway the idea is that it looks like a jellyfish with an armour but from behind it looks like a flower.

3d Shadows

My idea is to do a 3d-shadows for the Character, vehicle and environment. I think Imaginary forces Flashback Cinematics for God of War explain it the best.

http://vimeo.com/10307894

The idea is to underline what you can't see. Everything's black but the dim light catches all the detail of the figures you need to see to understand what it is. It kind of looks like the Indonesian shadow puppetry Wayang Kulit, just in 3d.

http://akhirlusono.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/wayang-kulit24.jpg

The character is this epic skinny warrior kind of guy that has a massive mask like the Guinean baga tribe:

http://www.hamillgallery.com/BAGA/BagaAnok/BagaAnok01s.jpg
The guy doesn't look too intimidating by his mysical appearance but the darkness and scary decorations make him look like someone you wouldn't want to meet.

The concept I have is fantasy. The art I'm using as a reference is from a time when row boats we're the most complex vehicles, so for this shadow puppet I'm thinking about making a plane that mixes Da Vinci's crazy planes and scifi space ships.

http://c0021553.cdn1.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/2979155343_9f82ee2b40.jpg

Because I want it to look scary with as minimalistic things as possible I'm thinking of making it a lot of massive wings that have a lot of bars, making it looks like a skeleton in the darkness of the "scene".