New Project - Alien Sushi Hut

Greetings yet again!

Way back in college, I had an idea for a short animated film that involved a kind of "planetary prison;" a penal colony set up on a desolate world where life was rough and alien criminals from all over would have to band together in order to survive. Kind of like the country of Australia... with aliens! I had sculpted two of the main characters as an assignment for one of my classes, but unfortunately since then they had accidentally been nudged off their display table and are now in several pieces...

Anyway, fast-forward a few years. This past summer I saw the fantastic film "District 9," directed by Neill Blomkampf and suddenly my idea of aliens marooned on a desolate planet jumped back into my head

One of the more compelling ideas was for an open-air marketplace, where beings could gather and exchange goods. Learning from my previous experience with my train station, I decided to double-down on a single shack; a micro-level environment, packed with detail and character, and see what I could do. *Poof!* The alien sushi hut was born.

The big points I wanted to hit were Character, Detail, and Color. An opportunity to make a ramshackle food stall made up of scavenged materials makes for a lot of interesting scenarios. For the centerpiece of the stall I wanted something anachronistic. Something that under normal circumstances would have no business being used to make food for hungry patrons. I settled on an old busted robot being used as a stove.

As you can see I've begun the initial modeling for pieces in the environment, and it's been a lot of fun adding all kinds of dents and chips in the models themselves. I hope to take a lot of them into Mudbox and really go to town on the normal maps. I have the basic UV layouts set up on all of my finished models, and hope to get started on texturing very soon!

As for the hut itself, I have a basic layout set (the semi-transparent shell in the image below), and I hope to cover it in corrugated metal, wood, etc. All in all I'm very excited about this project, and can't wait to show you more! Until next time!

More concepts

Hello!
I've been waiting on a new copy of 3ds Max to arrive, so I've been striking forward on new concept pieces for the steampunk mod, which we've tentatively titled BOILER. We did a bunch of story and character related tasks this week, focusing on the two teams and what kinds of characteristics and backgrounds they have. The zeppelin is meant to be part of the red team, while this week I focused on something from the blue team. I've got a ways to go before I nail down the final characteristics of both teams, but I think I've gotten on the right track!

Explanations for each piece below!



This week was largely spent on concepting an adversarial vehicle for the zeppelin to fight. We settled on a kind of anti-aircraft turret that fires large heavy shots that would be dangerous to zeppelins. I went through a few ideas (shown above), but we latched on to the idea of a large armchair with a cannon attached.


I liked the idea of a self-propelled turret that could move to whereever it needed to go, and since we're working with wacky, zany steampunk stuff, why not give it legs?



We started a little character stuff this week, and while Ken and Scott were brainstorming, I just started on drawing silhouettes, based on what kind of characteristics we settled on. Above is what we started working on for the zeppelin pilot, a kind of sea-captain thrust into zeppelin service as a result of technology springing forward at an unnatural pace. This coming week will probably be more concept work, so stay tuned!

-Jas

Oi! A Zep!

Hello!
In a continuing effort to keep my blog up to date, I've roughly decided on keeping it updated at least every Sunday. This Sunday dump, I thought I'd show you what I've been up to lately. Behold!







I've been working with two good friends over the last couple of weeks designing a total conversion modification for Unreal Tournament 3. We are all huge fans of the steampunk genre, and thought it would be great to do something that was wholly different from what we were used to doing at work. Thus our idea for a multiplayer team-based vehicle game was born.

I've been solely responsible for all content creation thus far, from concept to completion, so it's been a huge creative responsibility!

We're still in the early stages of our project, but we hope to have more information, including a website, shortly! Stay tuned, and in the mean time, keeping checking back here for art dumps!

-Jas