Finally!!!1|1|11

    So it's been a long time since i've made a substantial posting, and it probably be longer still ttill there's anything really worth it on here - but i figure since i've got the shit to put on here...why not do it anyway?

     So this is the concept i came up with for the wall that goes around the main/initial town in my story (it would be the equivalent to Traverse or Twilight Town from Kingdom Hearts I/II). I was heavily influenced by the Great Walls of Ba Sing Se (from Avatar: The Last Airbender), but there were a few times where the wall just seemed...funny and whimsicle because of how it rose/fell and weaved along the mountain crest.




     I can understand why a wall built like this would have an ever-changing 'levelness', but since there's elemental manipulation in my story, i don't want to be limited to "real world" mechanics...which is kind of why i find some of these pictures i captured so funny.








     This is a pretty good kind of "middle ground" between the rise/fall of the terrain and the levelness of the wall. Again, i wanted mine to be a constant height, so this would only partially represent my idea.









     This is the kind of...aesthetic i'm going for in my wall design - grand, towering, impenetrable, almost as if it weren't man-made. I mean, the ground at the base of the wall isn't 100% level, but they maintain a constant height all around the inner-city. There's far less terrain near the city of Ba Sing Se than in my story, but the constant height thing is almost a must for me.







    This was a concept sketch i came up with for for my main town (after the post below this one, but before my design for the wall) and it might not make much sense to the viewer without any insight into my story/worl, but i'll eventually have some 3D mock-ups going on to illustrate the train routes and underlying terrain (i was kind of aiming for a small mountain/hill range encircling one larger mountain/hill that would have the Archives library sitting atop it)

More sketches and designs to come soon now that i've dusted off my Wacom tablet and found it far easier to sketch "layered" ideas in photoshop than on paper and then transfer.

Train-ing

This is just a draft (slightly composited with some touch-ups in photoshop) of what i'm thinking of making the layout of my first major town (and hugely skill-tasking project) of Quinsa. Since it's going to be a sort of hub where alot of different trains, people, goods, and what have you come through, i gave the train layout a lot of thought (and try not to picture a single set of tracks along each line...there's going to be a few sets and maybe another level in some places - sometimes a larger train will utilize two sets of tracks because it's so huge).

So i'm going to finish touching it up tomorrow and should have a clear 'inked'/line version ready along with some better place markers and more flair.

Just uploading to have a place other than my hard drive to put it.

Weekend Work

     So this is basically what i got accomplished Saturday. Not all day Saturday, but from start to what you see in the renders is maybe 3 hours (i spent a lot of time learning how to 'Sculpt' geometry and then wasted about half an hour trying to paint it...which never worked).
     So this little 'Island in the Sky' is called Rho (Greek letter for "R"). And i've been using it in my story forever, i just never got around to making a good enough model of it.


     There's a whole long reason why it's floating and why there's a 'shaft' coming from it, but i won't go into it now. But the bridge (if you couldn't tell that's what it was) was built because the people of my story's world believed Rho to be the Land of the Gods (similar to Olimpus; able to be located, but no mortal can ascend to the top). This whole scene is incomplete too. At the end of the bridge there's supposed to be a few mountains to which the bridge connects to.




     This is a rendering of the underside of Rho (if it was hard to tell from the render). When i finally finish an acceptable model (as this on is a bit too long and not right in it's overall hieght (when placed over the reference drawing i made a couple posts below, it didn't quite match up...) I'm going to paint it and apply some nice layered texturing (which i also learned friday). It's basically going to be grass on the top (along with more geography like mountains and maybe a small water source), and grass hanging over the side a little bit. Then dirt and soil for a bit, and then it'll transition into real hard rock and earth.
     I'm gonna try and make another model of it next weekend or something, now that i know quick ways to deform the geometry to how i want. Today i'm gonna go learn about Particle Effects:

*Next Up: A Rocket with Particle(smoke) Trail. I might even composite it into the rho scene as i will eventually be using rockets and such in it for good ol' fashioned destruction.

Summer Projects: Avatar Rebirth

     So the summer is starting, and it's time to shake the cobwebs off and start getting into the swing of modeling again since i'll have a pretty intense Maya course during the upcoming fall semester. So during the summer i'm going to be doing two things in Maya to freshen my overall skills:

--> FFS: The Final Fantasy/Sonic crossover me and my friend DJ are working on...details in a few posts below.

--> Avatar Rebirth: I'll be trying to model some of the big-scale things from the video game i'm working on.


          So for both projects, i'll be the only one doing the 3D modeling and pushing my skills in as many areas as i can:
Texturing (including 3D paint and UV mapping);
Lighting
Environment Modeling (terrain, trees, grass, clouds, things like that);
Character Animation (which includes modeling, rigging, Inverse Kinematics...*shudder*, and animating);
Rendering (using multiple passes to achieve desired rendering)
Special Effects (like particle effects and such).

     So for right now, since the above drawing is the only thing i have to work with that's detailed enough for me to work with in Maya, i'm going to be working on this over the weekend and should have some WIP renders soon.

     As soon as i've got some good sketches for the FFS project, i'll start posting stuff for that on here as well.

Archives Layout

Here's something i worked on today for my story. It's just an outline of the place known as Archives.....5 guesses as to what it is. It's basically al the things i had known were going to be in Archives since i decided on it. The only reason i decided to kill some time drawing/planning it all out was so that it's finally down on paper and not fluid in my mind...the more that's on paper means the less it'll change if i have other ideas.