Summer

I started concepting a little project to keep me busy and fresh over summer. All I have now is some rough sketches and a bunch of notes and ideas. I'm just about ready to start a nice concept painting to work from. It's looking like I won't have the painting done until school gets out, but that's fine.

So the project I'll be making is a small environment using the same Maya, ZBrush, Photoshop, UDK workflow I've been used to. I may try and throw some 3DS Max in there.

Short version explanation: A huge cave space. In the cave space a smooth granite bridge spans an inifinite chasm. Across the bridge, an alcove houses a giant fragmented shard that is mechanically harvesting the essence of this cave, which is being absorbed into and body of water underneath the shard and then into carved grooves in a flat section of the granite wall.

Long Version explanation: The idea of this environment is a granite, cave-like space. The walls of this cave will be organic and jagged granite, with a transition to a super smooth, highly polished walking surface. This surface leads to a bridge, made of the same highly polished granite. The bridge leads over and infinitely deep chasm and into an alcove hollowed out of the side of this huge rough, granite wall. Extruding from a hole in the ceiling of the alcove will be this huge shape made up of fragmented pieces of this granite stuff, arranged in a cone, or wedding cake layered style. Each layer will be abruptly rotating in opposite directions. They will rotate a quarter-turn and stop, then begin again. I want that movement to be very harsh and mechanical. I want this object to feel like it is harvesting this essence stuff from the granite. This big fragmented shard will be suspended above a small body of water. Out of the cone, shard thing this essence stuff will be absorbed into the water, which it will then travel over to a big smooth piece of the granite wall with grooves carved into it. The essence will be sucked up through the grooves into a receiver of sorts. So this big cone object will be harvesting this essence which will be collected by the flat section.

It is probably pretty convoluted right now, but I'm still working some stuff out. I'm setting this project up to allow me to spend a lot of time on the shaders and in matinee.

Here are some rough sketches, which are also probably pretty convoluted:

So you can see a semi-thumbnail in the center of the page of the bridge leading into this alcove space. Also, some ideas of what the shard extrusion will do and possibly look like.

Another thumbnail of pretty much the same thing. A little bit more detailed than the other, but it's pretty much just a re visitation of the previous page of sketches. I think it's a little more clear what's happening in this 'thumbnail'. I really need to work on the read-ability of my thumbnails...

Once I spend a little more time on the design of everything and get a solid painting started, I think a lot of this will be more clear.