The Cambridge Five: Table v.2

After a few creative criticisms it was evident that the base of the globe drew away from the concept art of the table so I've gone back and remodeled the globe supports to be attached directly to the table for a more sleek look.

The Cambridge Five: Conference Table Model

I felt like I wasn't making headway with the overall lair modelling so I've gone in to model the assets to go into it. The table didn't present any problems whilst modelling and I've tried to keep the poly count to a minimum since this is for a video game.

The Cambridge Five: Lair Cutout Concept

I feel that the circular design of the lair will be the final choice so I'll start blocking out the base model of the lair in maya. The idea is that the lair was built as an add-on addition to the manor owned by the spies.

The Cambridge Five: Chair Designs

These chairs are to go along with the conference table.

The Cambridge Five: Conference Table Designs

The conference table will be the center of attention in my lair scene so I wanted to make it extravagant and keeping to the Bond style of Ken Adams. I wanted to have something on the table that would be a focal point to the meetings so I'm going for a globe of the world or some computer monitors.

The Cambridge Five: Door Designs

So far I've been doing thumbnails for the overall layout of the lair but little in terms of detail and attention to style. I've begun to design the more intricate details of the room and here I've done four door designs and one of which I will use for each spies door. Since there will be five doors in the room I figured it would be a prominent feature that will instantly catch the eye so I wanted them to appear very flashy.

The Cambridge Five: Further Lair Layout Experimentation

I've decided to further experiment with the circular lair design with these two concepts and toying with room proportions and scale.

The Cambridge Five: Initial Lair Layout Ideas

While I'm still working out how the lair design will incorporate each spies individual personalities I've gone ahead and tried to get the general shape and layout of the lair itself in place so that afterwards I can go in and start remodeling it based on the spies. So far I'm trying to work with the number of spies so five in this case and have five different sections for each spy.

Major Project: Influence Maps for the Lair

Now that I've decided to move forward with the villain lair belonging to the Cambridge Five I'm deciding on the style the house will be set upon in between the 1950s and 70s. I want to incorporate a mixture of upper class British with a subtle underlining of Soviet design. The secret lair will be a customised house of the privileged Cambridge Five and won't adhere to 'normal' standards of houses from that age.
A big thanks to Phil as well for pointing me towards the Spy Vibe blog that has a good source of spy-esque images.

I will also be looking at art movements from those decades to further enrich the design of the lair.

Major Project: Spy Lair Influence

This home in the Stella Artois advert has a similar theme of what I want for my home with hidden compartments and equipment.

Major Project: Refining the Spy Hideout

Out of my five ideas (spy hideout, mage's home, crashed ship, parkour circuit, and the turret defense) the spy hideout seems to have received the most positive attention. My original plan for the hideout involved basing it in the 1960s to 70s with secret rotating panels for equipment however after speaking with Alan it was clear that if I did not create a context or 'hook' for the hideout then it would just simply become an 'area'.
So I went about researching further into historical spies and espionage stories and that led me to two of the most famous spy rings the Portland Ring and the Cambridge Five (I guess they were only famous because there were so few spies exposed). The Portland Ring was led by a ladies man Russian spy by the name of Konon Molody and were passing information on naval weaponry to the KGB. It was the Cambridge Five ( Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and possibly John Cairncross) that caught my interest however as they were five British graduates of Cambridge University who loved their country, hated Fascism but also preferred the ideals of Communism.

 My idea will be transferring from a spy hideout of  the main character to a villain lair of the Cambridge Five and since they were from a privileged upper class the lair can venture into the eccentric. A combination of British architecture of manor houses with the stark contrast of Soviet Communist style. However since the Cambridge Five existed well into the 70s before they were exposed the house could also incorporate retro furnishings.

Major Project: The Ideas

It's time to finally get a move on with the Major Project aka the big finale.

I've written up several rough ideas with the basis of creating a stand-alone video game environment; it will be created as a showcase piece and not playable however it still has to be video game minded.
I will keep narrowing down ideas then once I've made my decision on the final one I will do further research for it, select an art style and move on from there.

Major Project Ideas

The Art of "Bosch's Nightmare"

Final Renders

  Minor Project Art Of "Bosch's Nightmare"

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.