Realistic Reveal - Uncharted 3 Inspired Environment

So it's been way too long since I've updated 8U  Since I have lots of stuff, I'll make a new post every few days so there won't be one big post overload. First off, I'll post the finals to my 30-day Realistic Reveal assignment.

Most of my assets in Maya:

And the camera fly-through with just Melanie's and my exterior environment:

Mostly Realistic, Some Fantastic

Realistic Reveal, about halfway done now. Two weeks down and two weeks to go. Here's an overhead view of the environment that I drew at the very beginning of the project, which has since changed a bit. Melanie is doing everything from the street-facing side of Drake's orange building to the left, and I'm doing everything from the face of his building (with the white balcony) to the right, so the map is about split in half between us, and then Eli has the inside of Drake's flat.

I have almost all my models done and I'm about to start on textures - from these shots the only things with semi-final textures are the street cobblestone and ground brick in the square. Surface materials are just general block-in colors at this point.

 
The models I've made so far, still need to make more:

The basic block-out for my Hero Asset, a horse carriage:

Then for DFA we're still fleshing out our Fantastic environments. I did two paintings of the world, one of an exterior space near the factory building Melanie and I had decided on, and one of the inside of the building looking down over the machine room space we were planning to do.

But then we decided to scrap that and change our environment - it's still going to be inside the factory, but instead of doing a big, open factory machine room with the fancy upper-class lounge and balcony room above it, we're doing the evil executive boss' office room (Melanie's room, on the left in below image) and the adjoining meeting room, which are still within the factory. The factory builds machines that keep the people in order for these power-hungry political figures, so my hero asset that'll be on the platform in the middle of the meeting room will be some kind of Steampunk machine/weapon.

Blocked out both rooms in 3D, then took screenshots of mine trying to find the best composition for a production painting to explain the space. I'm gonna go with the bottom right, so you'll see a painting of the room next time.

Biome, Fantastic, and Realistic

 I finished the Biome project in 3D last week:

 I really wanted to vertex-paint moss on those rocks and I'm not happy with the far background with the awkward stick trees; I had placed them with the foliage tool and then it crashed UDK and wouldn't let me edit them without crashing again, so I had to leave it as-is until I find a way around it. Planning to fix these things and others like the water movement/rapids, so consider this a WIP.

Here's my 1-minute Steampunk culture montage for Game Design:

And a bunch of quick thumbnails figuring out ideas for the Dishonored Fantastic environment in DFA:

As well as some WIP value studies:

So the biggest project right now is that we've started the Realistic Reveal environments c8  I'm so freaking excited, I love everything about this project. I'm working in a team with Melanie Morillo and Eli Allen on an Uncharted 3 inspired environment. We decided to do Nathan Drake's bachelor pad (since it's never been seen or referenced in the games before) and made it in Cartagena, Colombia, but it'll have some visual aspects of Morocco and Casablanca. Mel and I are doing the exterior environment outside Drake's second-floor apartment, and Eli is doing the interior, which will be connected by a walk-out balcony. We're in the 3D block-out/planning phase, but the exterior will be something like below.

 Team Henley ACTIVATE.

Where did September go

I love every project we've been getting in my GAD classes. Everything is so much fun and I look forward to every new project c8

Here are my finished character renders for DFA:

Now in DFA we've been working on concepts for our Fantastic environment project. It's one of the biggest projects of the year along with the Realistic environment project, which we actually start next week in 3D. Both projects are 5 weeks long,  and pretty much the most important pieces we put in our portfolio for this semester, if not the whole year 8U  For both projects we start by picking an existing videogame to use as inspiration, then make our own environment that could potentially fit in that game's world. For the Fantastic environment I'm using Dishonored (which comes out October 9th) as my inspiration reference. Even though we're spending awhile doing concepts for the Fantastic environment, we don't start on it (actually making it in 3D) until November, after the Realistic project is done, and we hop right into the Realistic project next week right after our Beautiful Biome project we're working on right now.

Anyways, here's some finished stuff from the Before and After project that was finished in 3D earlier this week:

Contact sheet of all three models we needed to do for the project - a barrel, a crate (I did a lobster trap instead), and a bottle. The project was a study of materials and vertex painting textures, so we learned to mess with the material editor to get the different before-and-after looks. I decided to make my props so they fit into my previous 3D assignment, the coral reef modular kit.

For the Beautiful Biome project in 3D we're focusing on making a biome environment with all organic models, so I chose this awesome-looking park called Plitvice in Croatia. Trying to pretty much recreate it from this photo and a bunch of others.

In Game Design we finished our What Happened Here paintings:

And now we're working on a Sub-culture Montage project where everyone chose a sub-culture to research and then we make a 1-minute montage video that encapsulates it. I chose Steampunk for my sub-culture, lol. Learning more about it will also help me differentiate / incorporate elements of it into the industrial Victorian environment I'll be making for the Dishonored-inspired Fantastic environment.

What Happened, Kangaroo?

Here's an (almost) finished WIP of my first "What Happened Here" painting from Game Design. It's Varanasi, India subjected to hardcore pollution, ten years after everyone has abandoned the city.

I like the contrast of bright colors on the dead city, because I feel like this place will always feel alive - it has so much character and history even if it's just a bunch of empty buildings. I'm gonna desaturate it for the next iteration, but I do like this warm color scheme a lot. In the next painting of the same place, it'll be 100 years after the disaster, and people have started coming back and re-populating, bringing the city back to life.

For DFA we refined some of the abstract characters we had sketched out before:

Now we're on to rendering them out in gray-scale. I love all this character drawing, it makes me so happy ;v;  I want to go back and draw a bunch of the other characters from my abstract shape sheets some time, I saw so many fun characters in them c8