What’s up, doc?
In this new blog series, we bring you an insight into what happens on our toon creation lab: from concept art to 3D modeling! During the next blog posts, we’ll be exploring his Cosmic Highness, Star-Pharaoh Marvin.
Last post we went over designing a toon and in this occasion, we’ll follow the same process for his building.
Off we go!
Let’s build a pyramid for our Pharaoh…
First, as in any other task that the Concept Art team works on in World of Mayhem, we gather our references! We need to think about the game as a whole and how this house will complement its region, its characters, and how it will exist in harmony within all of the game’s universe.
As you can see, our references here include the final version of the toon concept and the classic references from the cartoon from which this character’s whole concept is based on. We also include the props that were created for this toon’s animations and the houses that will coexist with it in the game, as well as houses from other regions.
Then we’ll start the first concepts and begin exploring!
It is important that we work very loosely in this step of the process, focusing on giving as many different options as possible. We try different shapes, different approaches, always taking into consideration the limitations that we have in the game. One of these limitations comes with the height of the house, for example, as we don’t want to cover others in the vicinity!
Here we see three of the final options that came out of this first exploration.
Once the feedback rounds are done, we chose the final design. It’s time to clean up the sketch.
As you can see, we do not use perfect lines, or curves, or even a perfectly aligned perspective when cleaning up a sketch. Instead, we try to make the forms more faceted both in lines and in its rendered phase.
We want these houses to stand out and belong in the looney universe we’ve created.
After the lines are perfectly imperfect, we add the flat colors in which the house will be rendered into. We also indicate the different details or all the effects the house is supposed to have, such as the glowing hieroglyphs or the galaxy on the bottom of the pyramid.
Now we’re almost done. We have the rendered house ready for the 3D team, who will model it and insert it in its already predefined region tile. The house is ready to ship it with its new tenant into the World of Mayhem!
And that will be all for this second post. Stay tuned for the next installment in the series, folks!
Writen by Bruna Richter, Concept Artist at AQUIRIS
