The Polycount Newsfeed

Soooo after a good decade we have removed the dust of this very special project that sorta kickstarted many of our careers.
I am happy to call many of the people we worked with back then my friends and colleagues. It has been quite a ride.



Follow me to the last page for the latest updates

https://polycount.com/discussion/62779/airborn#latest

https://linktr.ee/airborn.art



As we are moving closer to our first demo, i thought it might be time to start a dump for all our stuff over here...

So first of all what is Airbørn (not Airborne, more like born in the air, with a propeller as the o, awsum isn't it? )?
Airborn is a universe we are working for well, humm... quite some time i think 2 of us started experimenting with the world in 2006 maybe late 2005 i'm not sure, so it went quite a long way from the first ideas and artworks to what it is now.
Airborn plays in a steampunkish (sort off early industrial, more brutal then the fine victorian steampunk) world quite a while after the World collapsed from over exploitation.

Our first Demo will take place in a story around Piño (he got the name after he was designed, as at first his projectname was just "boy" and a lot of people said "oh he looks just like Pinocchio" and also posta and niño - courier boy)
it's been done with Unreal Tournament 3, we created almost every asset from ground up, as the unreal assets didn't help us much (as opposed to some other mods that are way further but can reuse assets, like animations, shader etc) the only assets we reused are sounds, but even those will be replaced if we win at least a little amount of money at MSUC

http://nonpublic.airbørn.de/wip/neox/boy01/09.jpg an earlier design from 2006
newer image should update to the latest build but i'm too lazy :P we worked on the colors and changed some details
the zbrush sculpt

he wants to be a postman just like his father was (more about that story part later ), he is living with his grandparents




only one of them is modelled yet.




the first demo will take place on one small part of his home island, the harbour of said island



we are currently working to get the rough framework to be ready to add more
environment and gameplay, so the first demo will mostly be just about the artdirection, you will be able to walk around look at stuff, do some veeeeeeeery basic gameplay (really not much, so don't expect too much).

so i guess i just opened a junk yard for all our stuff, going to post a brief history of the enemy design later in a seperate post, i guess this is enough for now to give an overview.

you can see some of the other stuff over at moddB:

http://ww
w.moddb.com/mods/airborn

ArtStation Link Here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3qnmJD

This Environment is made in Unreal Engine. It was actually more a project for myself to understand how to create a nice Landscape using the Virtual Texturing, Stylized Foliage, Rocks and also how to create a nice composition and a color palette.

I was highly inspired by some other artists: Jasmin Habezai-Fekri, Sophie Rose Stübinger and Victoria Zavhorodnia.

The House is actually based on the Concept Art Farm Fable from Kiel Whitaker (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/g2LvL8)

In this project I also learned how to create Foliage and Rocks.

The softwares I used are: Unreal Engine 4, Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Substance Designer and Adobe Photoshop.

I also wanted to learn how to make a Stylized Sky, unfortunatly the final result in the Sky is not what I wanted to do, the clouds are actually planes with the textures of the clouds. From other Environments that I saw, I think the other artists use a SkyBox or SkySphere but I'm not sure.

Thanks everyone!

And I think I'm done. Been collecting some images for an Artstation post and thought I'd share.

Hello! I'm starting a new personal project, and as per my usual process trying to identify the areas I want to improve upon. Thing is, whereas usually I'm fine with just analyzing my previous work retrospectively (the lack of tunneled vision and the honeymoon effect does wonders), I'm having a bit of a hard time right now: aside from usual misses stemming from laziness I don't really hate my previous character artwork. So the best course of action I could come up with is to be more thorough and use tools better suited for the job... Which is not good enough since aside from having fun I want to also get better at it.

I would really appreciate any criticism, especially regarding the design and texturing! Oh and the actual human parts were generated by the wonderful Metahuman Creator, so pay no attention to those.

With this one I was going for a kind of life support space wetsuit look; an old and worn out type, something like you'd see in a run down Soviet museum or something.

Plain modern wetsuits were the starting point in the design. Them being plain and rather detailless though I've also used a bunch of fictional stuff as references: ranging from David Lynch's Dune costumes to Mass Effect characters. Other than that there were some other things like old ball computer mice with this ugly yellowish plastic that I used for... ugly yellowish plastic parts. Or cat tongue spikes for the bottom of the shoes (that I ended up not including in any character renders).

Some early WIPs

The idea with the tubes and everything here is that in the grim, dark, transhumanistic future you want to optimize (and dehumanize) your alien starship pilots, so you design them and their equipment to not leave the chair, ever. Thus you remove most of the pilot's internal organs and let the life support do the job. It's also a great excuse to not include any movement-induced wear and keep the dust uniform...

How it ended up looking in the final scene

The next thing is just a bunch of messy doodles so far, but why not.

Initially I was going for a somewhat utilitarian-looking space explorer suit; something more like Denis Dilleneuve's Dune (wait a minute...), with the design centered around a repeating horizontal motif. Later though I've moved to more of a goofy space adventurer vide, with a lot of inspiration drawn from Victorian era military outfits. I don't intend to go for the old and gritty look this time; only factory new looking plastic and rubber.

Anyway, I'd be happy to hear any critique, and if anyone has read through all this nonsense thank you for your attention.

Another pass with quick fibermesh

Project done for collectibles with the mentorship of the amazing Igor Catto, at ICS school.

I was greatly inspired by the works of Marco Plouffe, Cedric Seaut and Nikolay Georgiev. Tried to depict hybrid humans, with artificial bodies and shared minds.

Hope you all enjoy! If you went troutgh all the post, thanks a bunch!