Bosch's Nightmare: Concept Buildup (Hell)

I've moved onto finalizing the concept for the realm of Hell. At first the progression was to travel across regular looking islands but as this looked too generic and non-Bosch I've decided to put in a little more chaotic architecture matching silhouettes from Bosch's painting. I'll move onto toning and colouring the concept and move onto the other two realms.

Original

More Bosch

 

Rough 3D mock up (based off the original concept)

 

Bosch's Nightmare: Level Layouts

These are fleshed out concepts of the level layouts I previously designed. They're close to the final outcome of what I want for the levels, I only need to tweak a few things like game assets (trees, cover, etc.) and proportions. Once the tweaking is done I'll produce the final concept pieces for each realm with colours from Bosch's painting and move onto mapping out rough Maya scenes of the level.

 

 

Minor Project: Draft Level Layouts

Now that I've got initial concept art of the game environments it's time to properly plan it out so that the concept art has game direction. I've started out with rough layout of how I feel the levels should flow with room for further improvement.

Hell

 Earth

 

The heaven level layout is extremely rough at the moment however I do plan on keeping the vertical structure gameplay. 

Heaven

 

Minor Project: Colour Palettes

The original colour palette (below) seemed a bit too messy and overpopulated with colour so I've tried experimenting a bit further with fewer more selective colours.

 

I tried out a completely new palette with new colours selections from the painting itself and not the old palette. It doesn't seem to be working too well however.

 

So I went back to the old palette and sampled colours from it and applied it to a more minimal version. It seems to be a lot more controlled in terms of quantity and consistency.

 

 

Minor Project: Working with Silhouettes

I've taken silhouettes from the collection and mixed and matched them to get these three compositions.

Minor Project: Silhouettes

My prior concept pieces lacked definite form and since I'm adapting Bosch's painting I thought it would be wise to extract silhouettes from the painting itself. Here are the most prominent shapes I could find within the painting itself.

Minor Project: Concepts

With these concepts I've been exploring the composition of the levels (theme and forms) without yet applying colours samples from 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' painting.

These two were created before the interim crit and never got uploaded separately so here they are.

Minor Project: Colour Palette Test

Having a little mind block with the level designs I've decided to play around with some colour palettes. In my adaptation unit doing a colour palette really helped me move forward with the designs so hopefully this experimentation will let me explore Bosch's world a bit more. This initial palette has colours taken directly from the painting but still unrefined (and too varied), I'll work further into getting more specific colours for each realm.

Minor Project: Interim Crit

Interim Crit 08/11/13

Minor Project: Draft Sketches

Here are a few sketches I've done primarily to just get rough ideas out onto paper. Hieronymus Bosch's style was surrealism and I'm trying to incorporate that into the drawings. At the moment these drawings aren't designed with a game mechanism in mind so my next set of drawings will be fleshed out with the concept of collection/puzzle elements while keeping with surrealism and religious symbolism.

Minor Project: Game Premise Revamp

Through my previous tutorial it was deemed that my first premise strayed too far from Hieronymus Bosch and his painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. I've taken the game idea straight into the world of the painting now playing as Bosch himself and letting the game levels unwrap from the painting context. This will keep the game's theme tied deeper to the Renaissance and what the people of that time (c. 1500's) experienced; a play on faith, sin and deep seeded symbolism.

During the tutorial it also became evident that my game lacks the mechanism around which the game play flows thus not allowing me to move on with level and character designs. I want to keep the mechanism as simple as possible so that I can fully concentrate on the concepts; I've created this draft flowchart of how the game could work as the player travels through the levels:

The game will act as a collection/puzzle type genre starting with the collection of tokens to bribe the creatures into handing over the virtue which will in turn be used to complete the monuments that are spread throughout the realms.

Minor Project: Game Premise

Sins of Memory

After each deadly sin boss that I design I will include a bio of said boss with information of what he's doing to David's memory and an epilogue of what the truthful memory is after David's defeated it. Thus unveiling the story as I progress through the designs.

Minor Project: New Proposal

As I was going through my original idea of adapting characters from the Revelation Space novel I found it difficult to get a grasp of the characters and their backgrounds. As it's already the beginning of week four I felt that spending more time pondering the characters wouldn't be beneficial so I'm moving on and the new idea is already looking more promising.

I'll still be going for character/creature design for this new idea only now my efforts will be focused around creating villains for a video game. The theme of the game and designs will revolve around the seven deadly sins from Christian ethics. The seven sins are quite often used in media and design and can result in generic outcomes if not done properly so my unique twist will be to bring in the "what if" factor.

"What if the highly innovative yet mysterious painter, Hieronymus Bosch, was to design seven villains for a modern video game based on the seven deadly sins?"

Jacques Le Boucq: Portrait of Hieronymus Bosch c. 1550

I will be using Bosch's work as a heavy influence on the villain designs with special focus on the symbolism and interpretation of his painting The Garden of Earthly Delights (1480 - 1490) in which Bosch shows his special talent for creating demons. Hieronymus Bosch had many followers as well as many imitators so I will reference to their work for influence as well.
Renaissance paintings had many influences from medieval religious symbolism so study into that symbolism will also help me nail down the final designs.

Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights (1480 - 1490)

Minor Project: Piecing Together the Ultranaut Culture

To adapt the Ultranauts from Revelation Space as a successful design their culture has to be analysed along with the backdrop of their living environment and even where they visit during space journeys.

The Ultras travel between planets for very prolonged periods of time, usually going into reefer-sleep so that they age at a reduced rate. The time span can reach up around a century before they visit the same planet again where they will trade resources, technology and upgrade their bodies.

These large gaps in time between body upgrades will be my main focus for creating the Ultra; coral like in structure, they will have new prosthetics mixed in with old and even layered on some parts.
They take great pride in their chimeric nature and will show off in many bizarre ways some even going beyond what is considered human.

The triumvirate of the ship Nostalgia for Infinity are unusual even amongst Ultra culture as Volyova has no implants or prosthetics what so ever but is a great scientist and weaponeer, Sajaki doesn't have any obvious body mods but nanomachinery is crawling under his skin (he's also an adept spy, often remolding his face), and Hegazi is at the other spectrum of bodily modification, often intimidating other Ultras in the process with his over the top prosthetics.

Here are some descriptive paragraphs of Ultras and an example of a city they visit which correlates with the theme or coral building:

 (The short paragraph on page 82 above describes a small town that has been built in a collage of different styles over time. This logic can also be applied through the universe of Revelation Space given the large timescale that is always moves in.)

Mood boards will be posted soon working around the various descriptions throughout these paragraphs (i.e. - prosthetics old/new, coral structures, junk/recycling art)

Minor Project: Proposal

Project Type: Character Design for Animation

Area of Study: Character concept, Character Modelling, Texturing

Idea: I'm looking to adapt character(s) from a space opera novel series written by Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space. The universe it set half a millennium into the future from the 21st century where human have not only achieved space flight but have splintered into several factions with different cultures, states of mind and even bodies; some not resembling humans anymore.

My main focus will be on the Ultranaut faction, a splinter of humans that spend most, if not all of their lives, travelling on spaceships. To endure the lengthy spans of space travel and aging they heavily modify their bodies and even take pride in it.

In the novel the main ship throughout the story is crewed by Ultras with the triumvirate being the leaders (Volyova, Sajaki and Hegazi). All vary in their degree of chimeric integration and Hegazi, the most chimeric of the bunch, will be the one I will model in Maya.

Outcome: Fully resolved character concepts in Photoshop with a facial expression sheet and a 3D model of the character with a rig to pose and a turnaround.

Goal: To be able to create believable and likable characters and bring out their personalities during the design phase.

Maya Mental Ray: Optimisation

Render 1
0:36

RCI  0.3    429 MB info : max depth         : 40
RCI  0.3    429 MB info : max leaf size     : 191
RCI  0.3    429 MB info : average depth     : 34
RCI  0.3    429 MB info : average leaf size : 7
RCI  0.3    429 MB info : leafnodes         : 531119
RCI  0.3    429 MB info : bsp size (Kb)     : 31804

Render 2
0:34

RCI  0.3    436 MB info : max depth         : 50
RCI  0.3    436 MB info : max leaf size     : 66
RCI  0.3    436 MB info : average depth     : 35
RCI  0.3    436 MB info : average leaf size : 7
RCI  0.3    436 MB info : leafnodes         : 646827
RCI  0.3    436 MB info : bsp size (Kb)     : 37689

Render 3
0:34

RCI  0.3    437 MB info : max depth         : 60
RCI  0.3    437 MB info : max leaf size     : 66
RCI  0.3    437 MB info : average depth     : 35
RCI  0.3    437 MB info : average leaf size : 7
RCI  0.3    437 MB info : leafnodes         : 648727
RCI  0.3    437 MB info : bsp size (Kb)     : 37795

Render 4
0:35

RCI  0.3    436 MB info : max depth         : 45
RCI  0.3    436 MB info : max leaf size     : 66
RCI  0.3    436 MB info : average depth     : 35
RCI  0.3    436 MB info : average leaf size : 7
RCI  0.3    436 MB info : leafnodes         : 633009
RCI  0.3    436 MB info : bsp size (Kb)     : 36980

Depth 50 Samples 2

0:34

Depth 50 Samples 1
0:29

Maya Mental Ray: Transitioning for Maya Software to Mental Ray

 Final