The ESCAPE: The Titan Awakens - MatthewKaufmann

MatthewKaufmann

Hello, everyone. I'm pretty much a newbie at 3d rendering, but I thought this contest would be an excellent chance to get some practice, so I'm going to give it a go!

Edit: Beauty & Tech Shots for final submission.

Beauty shot 1:


Beauty shot 2:


Tech shot:


For this piece, the viewer will be looking into the mouth of a volcano. A massive stone titan was trapped and fused into the interior wall of the volcano long ago. The impending eruption of the volcano has awoken the titan, and it is in the process of attempting to rip itself free from the stone wall. On an outcropping overlooking the volcano, a small humanoid heralds the awakening of its master.

My first order of business was to grab several reference images of lava and volcanic rock.



Next, I sketched out the scene (will have to scan and upload those sometime soon) and roughly blocked it out in Maya.



I'm still not totally satisfied with the composition, and I welcome any critique or advice to help me refine my technical and artistic skills. I will also be posting updates regularly. Looking forward to the contest.

04/22/2013: Model for the titan is done.

ScudzAlmighty

Pretty cool idea:)

MatthewKaufmann

Here are some screencaps of my initial pass at the base mesh for the titan. For this I included his rocky "chestplate" as part of the mesh rather than as a separate piece.

MatthewKaufmann

Next update. Here's the higher poly version of the titan model.




Here are some detail shots of the Titan's face/head.

Safemilk(Daniel)

Hey, cool concept! I'd like to see some more anatomy come through in the titan though, right now he sort of reminds me of a toy, if he had some sort of musculature to him but built out of rocks or something, I think that would really push him as a larger creature. Keep it up!

MatthewKaufmann

Thanks! This is my first time making something that's more humanoid, so I will definitely try to keep tweaking the model to make it better.

MatthewKaufmann

So earlier this week I finally got the retopology done for the lower-poly version of the titan model. Ignore the seam down the middle, I just retopo'd half the model and then mirrored it, but I'll fix the seam in the final version. By the end of this weekend I'm looking to have the texturing and normal mapping done on the low-poly model.

MatthewKaufmann

Well, now that I've got a texture on this, it looks SO much better. I painted most of the texture in Mudbox using three separate layers for the rock, lava, and yellow highlights. For the rocky sections, I added a specular map to make them reflective. For the lava, I used a glow map. My only major problem with it at this point is that nasty seam down the middle from the mirrored geometry.

These screen caps are all test renders in Maya. Next step: rigging this guy up and posing him.

MatthewKaufmann

Now that the main mesh is done, I've started building the environmental assets and compositing them together in UDK. Here's a quick screen cap of what I've got so far.