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Welcome to my personal student blog!
Here you can find my 2D Digital coursework that I've made during the year 2023, while studying at De Montfort University. This particular page showcases my projects for the course 'Game Art' and its module 'Digital Art practice', where I created a couple projects during my second year and second term - the Battle Boss Arena project, and the Battle Boss Arena (Boss Monster) project.
I've separated my workflow week-by-week, and each week is sort of stacked on top of one another through-out the page. In order to see the start of my Boss Arena project ( "The Loop" ), scroll to the very bottom of this page where you will meet Week 15. Later on, Week 20 marked the start of my Boss Monster, "The Spectre". Enjoy!
Finalizing the Battle Boss project
2023.04.24 - 2023.05.12
The Boss Monster project was also approaching the end and here are some progress pictures I took of finalizing this big monster cat.
In the progress picture right above this text, you can see that I always had a reference of my finished Boss Arena, just to make sure I stay in the same tint and value range as the environment for my final design. Below this text is the very final, finished render of my character.
With the final renders feature the supposed in-game lighting, my Boss Monster project was done. A big cat opposing an even bigger threat.
Finalizing the Battle Boss Arena project
2023.04.24 - 2023.05.12
It was time to finish up the Battle Arena project once and for all. I did a lot of brainstorming in regard to how I could merge my zBrush sculpt, hand-painting and photobashing all together, and there just seemed to be so much work to do in terms of keeping all of the above in-check with the lighting physics of the artwork. The part of the middle - the 'doughnut' still didn't have the crucial shadow from the curve of the loop falling above it, and therefore the Arena looked rather flat.
Slowly but surely, I began merging it up with the zBrush sculpt. I left out the ring - the attribute which I think was finished foor the most part.
It might have caught your eye that I previously put sort of metal grates in parts where the stone texture had an open cavity and crack, sort of showing the inside of the arena. I decided to change that to be parts of bones, such as spinal segments and ribs. The exposed bones allowed the player to brainstorm about the arena having fossils on the inside, conducting speculations about how it formed, and how old it was. The spinal segments also acted as good shelter.
Finally, this is how the arena looked like when I finished working on it. Working with all the other shading-work, the important blurry cast shadow that I added really allowed the overall structure of the arena to have a lot of dimension, height and depth.
This was the version that I called "lit" previously, displaying a bright source of supposed directional light just to provide all of the important information about the Arena's details. Like the materials and their textures, as well as the hero assets.
I figured I'd just include the slide from my presentation to showcase the hero assets, as it really explains the notable features best:
And this is how the 2D 'hybrid' scene looked in a supposed in-game lighting. I personally loved this render, and I liked that it felt so ominous overall.
Week 29 | Updating the Boss Monster design
2023.04.17 - 2023.04.21
I didn't forget about the other project that was closely connected to the Arena, and decided to refresh it with a major upgrade of its concept. What I had was an unclear and rough silhouette of the lion, and I decided that a sharp lineart would help me 'bring the project back to life'. The first detail I focused on was the lion's face and horns.
As mentioned in the previous weeks, I most preferred this particular design iteration that I made, so I was essentially following it while adding more details - most apparent one being the exposed insides on the underside of the lion's torso and groin area. It made a great attribute of weakness.
For the background, I used the same pictures and layer effects as I did for the Battle Arena, but adjusted them later on to portray it being the absolutely same environment that both the boss character and his habitat - the arena were located in.
You may notice I gave him a more noticeable crack on his face as well - a sort of a cleft lip that exposed a bit of his teeth. I found it to be a grim detail, perfectly contrasting his overall calm and curious expression.
I added some shading to the back as well and played around with the same photograph of this stone formation, putting it around on the lion's horns and places like elbows and ankles. I feel like it flowed nicely into the theme of the horns being a bit like a turret, since inside of the horns is where a mass of pure energy would be charged up and passed down to the inside of his skull, and moments after - blasted through the opening in his face.
Week 28 | Adding a background to the Battle Arena
2023.04.10 - 2023.04.14
This week I decided to focus more on the background of my Battle Arena, as well as generally delve deeper into the theme of it being surrounded by an astral, cosmic void and space instead of just pure darkness. I played around with a few pictures an a ton of layer effects, painted a bit of clouds and stars around. and made some important decisions while iterating between colour palettes.
While keeping and overall dull colour palette for my arena, I tried to see if a more saturated background would compliment its uninviting 'vibe' that it was giving off. Meaning I made the decision to light up the masses of dust and astral clouds with vibrant warm and cold shades. That is also how the concept of duality - red and blue - came to be throughout my artwork, too and in my mind it symbolized how the arena was stuck between dimensions, stuck in a contrast.
That's when I decided to look more into the concept art of League of Legends 'Dark Star' theme, and right away it ended up being by far my biggest reference and inspiration. moving forward with the piece:
Following my reference, what really did the trick was making my overall scene much darker. The light sources from the background would only give a rim light to my final render, and I figured it would be best to make two of them: lit, and an in-game one. After all, A concept had to be seen clearly when given to a supposed 3D artist who would have to re-create it.
Weeks 23 - 27 | Experimentation with the lion
2023.03.06 - 2023.04.07
This period of time wasn't too productive in my 2D digital art module as I was honestly more focused on my 3D work. Though as you can see, I did make improvements on my sketch, giving my boss a pair of horns, emphasizing how flowy his fridge was as well as made his insides slightly exposed through a big disconnection of his torso.
I tried to made the back look correct to the perspective - making his rear appear a bit bigger since it was closer to the viewer/player in the specific pose he was making. The backs of his paws were absolutely going to have big paw beans, sort of merging up with the stone but being a more squishy and fleshy material. I really liked the fact that I decided to go with a longer tail too, providing my character with the strength of knocking the player around with it.
For the longest time, I didn't know how to approach drawing his mane, so I tried to photobash it, but decided it looked too stiff as well as too shiny and consistent in the way it curled.
I also tried to implement him into 3D, to sort of explore his shape, body structure and pose. It was an interesting experience to have, And I felt as if I connected a little more with this project on a personal level.
This is as far as I got with modeling the boss character in zBrush, and to be honest I was quite surprised with myself as an artist who feels most comfortable in 2D art. I found this stage of development quite useful particularly because I brought up questions for myself in regard to the constructive segments and joints for the lion's limbs. It was also a nice change of pace and medium for this specific project.
Later on I did switch back to my 2D workspace, and made iterations of the simplistic design in a similar way that I made variations for my Future Tribes character the previous year. Out of the four of these, I definitely like the bottom right one most. Grandiose, curling horns were something I wanted to feature in the final render of my boss character as I felt it really provided him a more menacing look. And the flow of his long strands of silky fur provided an ethereal, colossal feel to his concept, while his upper arms and back legs emphasized the aspect of him being made from stone.
Weeks 21 - 22 | Further development on the Arena and its keeper - the Boss
2023.02.20 - 2023.03.03
At this point in time, I had became a little hesitant when it came to merging the 'digital media' that I used to make up my arena. The photographs felt as if they contradicted my lineart far too much, and the zBrush sculpt layer wasn't providing me as much lighting information as I needed. I was also a little anxious about hand-painting, thinking it would look far too out of place amongst the overlay of the photos and the 3D sculpt.
I knew I had to move on, though. An important step was to iterate between colours, and I debated whether I liked the vibrant wires or not. I felt the red tone was a good indicator of their voltage and danger.
As pictured in the screenshot above this text, I implemented my zBrush sculp into Unreal Engine 4 in hopes of it giving me more physically-accurate lighting, but I quicky realized it wasn't going to be correct since my modeled was neither retopped, nor unwrapped. It was frustrating because I realized how flat the artwork looked in Photoshop, and I didn't feel confident at all when it came to trying to replicate the supposed physics of cast shadows, and placing an imaginary directional lighting onto my poor height-less and depth-less 2D concept.
Continuing on with my Boss Monster character, I took my time to study the anatomy of the lion. My concept was unique in a way that my lion lived in an environment with little to no gravity, making me keep in mind that he'd move a bit similarly to how he would in water. My aim with the pose was to make the boss character look fluid, weightless, graceful. Perhaps more curious and wary than aggressive, since cats tend to play with their food, or anything smaller than them rather than attack them physically. My boss character wouldn't feel the need to oppose a threat - he was the threat.
I thought I'd include this particular stage of my character's pose development, since I found it quite fun and interesting of a process. What I did was basically connect a few of the photographs to help myself have a reference when creating his dynamic pose, then sort of patched it up to make my creature.
I then drew a sort of a base for my character's front and back renders, and I was quite satisfied with the dynamic and fluid pose that I gave him. I'd began adding details too and you may be able to spot how his face looks sort of sewn up – that is because of the pieces of it separating up during attack. Of course, this was just the rough start.
Weeks 20 | The beginning of the Boss Monster project
2023.02.13 - 2023.02.17
As sad as it is, the truth was that I had fallen quite far behind with my arena project due to nothing other than my poor time management and priority list. Still, I had to focus on finishing it. Therefore I decided it would be best to continue working on it alongside the new project - the Boss.
With that said, I rushed on with my arena, not excluding the amount of attention or effort put into it. Photobashing very much helped make the process faster and more visually fulfilling than hand-painting would, and I was starting to apply different types of materials onto my artwork:
As mentioned before, this week marked the start of the 'Boss Monster' project. I immediately thought of how I was going to render the final front and back quarters, deciding that I'll have it be only slightly photobashed and mainly hand-painted - the opposite of my Boss Arena. And below this text is the description of my boss character that I wrote based off a few condensed key points. It was very helpful to have guidelines and frames that didn't allow me to nit-pick one aspect of the design and instead made me focus on the whole of the character.
I gathered references that were great examples of a mystical, fantasy and, most importantly, hostile-appearing lion creature. I wanted to give him horns and glowing eyes because I thought they would fall into the theme quite well, as well as allowed the player to interpret his species as an alien race, inducing fear of being in a presence of it.
His colour palette was going to match the Battle Arena he lived in, which is why I ended up not even doing any colour iterations for the design. It was to be an overall quite bland and dull, gloomy variety of tones and values with the main glimpses of saturation and light being the glow of his eyes, as well as the previously mentioned formation of pure energy that he'd summon in-between his horns. The reference on the very right depicts a very flowy mane, and an overall slight luminescence that I really liked the look of.
I am a huge fan of the artist Dusty Ray (better known as Slop Jockey Art) and I was particularly inspired by their ominous and rather bizarre paintings of creatures with exposed, discoloured and deformed body parts. I wanted my boss character to possess a same type of 'aura', having him be uneasy and disturbing to look at in parts of some areas. Lions were considered gorgeous animals full of poise and pride, and I wanted to implement an 'ugly' side to that, to contrast the mask of the hypnotic beauty.
I was also inspired by the concept of the Sangheili (Halo). It piqued my interest to think of ways to have my boss character be able to expose his face particularly, by having its tissue open up a bit like a booming flower. I also went along with the alien aspect of his species, fitting since his environment was somewhat of a version of open space and cosmos.
As you can see, I visualized the concept of the character's face opened up, and only left his lower jaw exposed and visible in the void that lied under his skin. The stance that I gave him here was much more firm, as if there was strong gravity in the environment.
Weeks 19 | The start of photobashing
2023.02.06 - 2023.02.10
I found it quite handy to move back and forth between doing 3D and 2D work in regard to the overall development of my environment. The screenshots here depict me adding detail to my sculpt, from my digital sketch that I'd made the week prior.
Something I hadn't pointed out was the fact that from the top view, my arena looked like an infinity sign - hinting how long the player would spend here before they... give up.
As mentioned before, I gathered a lot more photographs in order to have realistic assets as somewhat of stickers to play around with and place around, all over my arena. My first focus was the ring, and I decided to portray it as my initial idea - dry vines, roots and branches twisting within each other:
Weeks 17 and 18 | Adding detail to the base sculpt from zBrush
2023.01.23 - 2023.02.03
The sketch on the right is pretty self-explanatory, no? What's there to be confused about. It's just a big cat in its big cat house.
Alright, I'll explain myself, but only with the help of the High Concept creation Matrix:
While it isn't the most formal and accurate of descriptions, I hope it provides a bit of information of my complicated vision that I had for this project. Because it was a little 'all over the place', I must say that I failed to rationalize some contextual details of it, leaving possible dead ends in the lore. But what truly mattered was the visuals, and here is how I illustrated what I saw in my mind in regard to my focused vision of the Battle Arena:
As explained in the contextual analysis of my vision, I hoped to merge contrasting attributes and materials together – having stone bend and curl, making it have randomly popped out or glitched formations stuck out of it in various shapes, perhaps exploring the inside of it and revealing it to be non-sensical in regard to the contents of minerals... There was a lot of materials to ply around with and I also wanted to connect modern technology objects with primitive materials like wood. The latter would inform the player of the arena not possessing any specific timeline and possibly giving them glimpses of the future world. All this flowed in perfectly with the theme of illusion, dream, surrealism. The rules were really starting to bend.
Something else to mention was that I made these design iterations, hoping to see how the Arena would look like with a different set of attributes and key focuses. You can see these variations of the concept right above this text. I just thought I'd move a little further away from the theme of contrasting materials and instead focus on a more connected and consistent theme throughout my arena. Aiming to explore different focuses, I positioned stars across the arena sort of tossing the concept to an overall more mystical and mythic feel. These variations sort of worked with the arena being in a space-like void. As well as it being like an alien object stuck in the cosmos.
Right above this text were some of the first references and photographs that I chose to us as inspiration for the material creation for the artwork. It was only rocks for now, but soon enough they would fill with all kinds of other organic formations, all ready to be photobashed together.
Another goal of mine was to have a dynamic balance of lighting and shape language throughout the final render of my arena. The set of pictures on the left side of this text portrayed the kind of 'vibe' that I found very attractive to have in an environment concept - whether it was alien-looking floating stone or real-life mountains and caves. I really liked the direction the project was going in, albeit slow, but it was definitely progressing.
Weeks 16 | Brain-storming in 2D
2023.01.17 - 2023.01.21
During this week, I began sketching up different variants of the very initial shape of my arena. I got a lot of strange looks from my peers and tutors trying their best to play around the mental gymnastics of how my vision would work in-game mechanic and lore-wise, and I absolutely could not blame them for being confused.
It was time to simplify things, and to back-pedal a little. I took the time to sketch my battle boss character, as well, and I feel like it really helped me make a better connected with the project. The vision now had a living entity to go alongside with, and I was encouraged to sort of re-start.
As you may notice, I played around with shapes like an eye, as well as triangles, but I decided circle-shaped pathways would portray the continuous cycle of confusion best. Then I popped back into 3D.
As mentioned before, I really liked the theme of big, round shapes orbiting around some sort of a core. That is how the middle formation of my model was born - the 'doughnut'. I decided to have one long loop sort of coiling around the 'doughnut', instead of there being two circles.
Here are a few screenshots I captured of my arena displayed in different angles. I believe they provided the most constructive information of my model, and I'd think they would be very useful to a 3D artist that I'd have handed my final design to. All in all, I was happy to have these three main shapes being the only key points of my arena moving forward: the 'doughnut', its ring and the loop.
Weeks 15 | Beginning of the Battle Boss Arena project
2023.01.10 - 2023.01.14
I had quite a bit of anxiety towards this project, just because of how much artistic freedom I was assigned with. It did give me a lot of excitement once I thought of my first ideas for the concept, yet there still was an underlying preference to work with something that I would have a bit more frames to look out for. It seemed I had to be the one to fully make all of the rules when it came to this task, and I accepted the challenge with realistic expectations. I did that, of course, by looking up the most bizarre fantasy structures with insanely complicated dimensions, structure and lighting:
On a more serious note, I quite quickly bundled up a mood board that would focus on an overall theme for my vision. I really liked the idea of allowing the main source of colour to be the environment, a bit like it was in the pictures above this text. I wanted my arena to have an dull atmosphere generally. While glancing back at the project brief, I thought of hero assets, deciding right-on to only have a few that would very moderately repeat throughout all of the environment. I took inspiration from various sources including James Cameron's Avatar, which included very organic and strange biomes. 'Organic' actually ended up being a key prompt that drove my arena's concept almost single-handedly.
Surrealism was an art genre that I was very curious about merging with the 'Battle Boss Arena' theme, helping the fight be more of a mind game. Just imagine having Salvador Dalí control the mechanics of a player's hostile environment.
My arena was highly inspired by a theme of a cycle, a loop, some sort of continuation and confusion, as well as its main material being a type of stone. I found many great examples of those type of attributes in the art of M. C. Escher as well as the Roman Colosseums.
As you can see, I firstly decided to try and envision my ideas in the 3D space. I ended up using 3DsMax and zBrush to try to execute the ideas on my mind constructively, and tried to be quite precise with the angle of the final render in mind. It was really just brain-storming while modeling and sculpting in 3D, but it greatly impacted my first attempt at grasping my vision.
Slowly but surely, I added a bit of surface detail onto my sculpt in zBrush, then thought of ways to have the player have a clear route of vertical movement throughout my complicated arena.
The first week was an overall productive time, though the projects of my other modules had started at the same time, and I could already feel I'd have a LOT of work to do.
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