Vitalize Mech Unit 2

This is the heavy unit of the mech army. Credit to art director Ian Pestridge for guiding some of the design decisions.

Male Prosthetic Limbs

A few variations of the prosthetics seen in the previous posts, this time catering for the male soldier build. As usual, I included material references for the 3d artists to keep in mind.

Smaug Pre-Film Design

Remember my nightmare Smaug design? Well it got me thinking about what the real Smaug would look like which resulted in this. In the original sketch I had one central horn at the back of his head to keep faithful to the illustration John Howe did for the Hobbit book. However the appeal of a traditional two horned look became too tempting to resist. I also made sure to extend the snout further than I usually draw dragons to keep it to a more old school wrym look.
This drawing was also an opportunity for me to go back to my roots. Back in my high school days I used to draw dragons and such nasties all over my books. It was an activity that earned me a couple of nicknames and where my alias 'Bendragon' originated from.

Female Prosthetic Limbs

Continuing from my previous post. The game did feature some playable amputee characters. These are some renders of the final design we chose for the female characters. I did go through a bunch of thumbnail drawings which we whittled down with the art director. Our goal was to make the designs desirable and cool without sacrificing functionality. The researching stage was very helpful for me to recognise the kind of shapes we have in modern military.

Vitalize Mech Unit 1

Here is a concept of a mech tank I designed nearly a year ago for a game called Vitalize that isn't released publicly as of this point. The enemies in the game were giant walking tanks that could be piloted remotely. I started to design the mechs in SketchUp as it proved more convenient to design such a complex structure in three dimensions. You could design your heart out with a pencil but then find that it doesn't work from another angle so 3D meant I was able to design from all sides simultaneously.
Above you can see the Photoshop paintover. The second image is the final in-game model where my SketchUp sculpt has been taken to the next level with more details and textures by Steve Walker. The rest are all renders of my original model.

Nightmare Smaug WIP #1

This weekend I had a nightmare where I somehow got to watch the second film of The Hobbit. Not something worth having  a nightmare about but when I am so highly anticipating the screen appearance of Smaug the dragon, getting him right is a huge hope for me. It was John Howe's illustration of Smaug that got me to pick up the book all those years ago when I was in primary school. I was terrible at reading but just loved the art enough that there was no other choice during World Book day.
Anyway back to the nightmare. So now you have an idea how much I am looking forward to seeing the beast's design. The film in my head opened up immediately with the dragon flying over the mountainous landscape. It was such a shock cause normally monster movies wouldn't make the big reveal until much later in the second half. Usually monster movies can go down hill from the point we see the feature's creature. So this imaginary version of the Hobbit shot down my anticipation straight away. I was praying that at least we would not see a close up. But this being my nightmare we get just that! A close up of Smaug appears and his design was so off the source material. He looked more like an alien than dragon! I was outraged in a fit of nerdiness! My outburst must have been such that it had waken me a little, enough for me to realize this was a dream. Rage turned to delight as I realized "I could steal this Smaug design!"
So here is the sketch so far from today.

Monsters Ink Yourself

Happy New Year everyone! I hope this year I can start blogging my work more frequently. Life is fast and its hard to catch my breathe since I moved to London. I have been contemplating over my work and where I want to take it in future. Maybe you can see that progress in future :) So with the little introduction over lets get into the meat of what this post is about.

This is a project some of my classmates from the Arts Institute at Bournemouth (AIB) thought up. With the Monsters University film only round the corner we thought we would try our hardest to get into the university. But our applications were all rejected since neither of us classed as 'monsters,' not literally anyway. So our master plan was to create our own monsters alter ego and apply again!
After about half a minute's pondering I decided that it would be best to represent myself as this dragon character. Dragon has been one half of my nickname here you know.