Maquettes as concepts

Makkon

I'm sure everyone has seen the maquettes Joel Emslie did for titanfall. I think this is an amazing approach, and I would really love to try my hand at doing that too. There isn't a lot of information that I could find on his approach, just some basics. I'd love to know more about his materials, workflow, hardware. Does anyone know where I can start?

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWgByQiDhpE"]Designing The Titans of Titanfall - YouTube[/ame]

Will Faucher

While this is undoubtedly really cool, I don't think this is a realistic approach for most game dev pipelines. This seems to me like the actual cost and time required would be significantly higher than just hiring a concept artist for 2D sketches, or even zbrush concept work.

And that doesn't even take into consideration the cost of materials...

Makkon

Very valid point. Maybe not the best approach for production work, although for functionality sake it makes perfect sense.

If not for any other reason, I'd love to try making some because I think they are totally rad.

pior

I think this approach is especially viable in a small, tight-knit team environment with maybe just one concept artist (probably also the lead/AD) doing whatever he/she wants, with maybe an assistant in charge in cleaning up pictures of the model and coloring them. (wild guess here !) Respawn being a rather fresh entity, this might actually be the case ...

I think a bigger studio would have too many "cooks in the kitchen", asking for a lot of revisions and rounds of approval until things are supposedly perfect, which would make this approach impossible to maintain (sadly).

Something similar was done on the boss characters of MGS4. There is a picture floating around showing the maquettes being used. If I remember correctly it is shown near the end of the art book.

Regarding how to tackle it in practice : I would think that he ordered a lot of 1/6 scale military parts and combined them. There is a whole niche market for such action figure accessories :

http://www.soldierstory-toys.com/

The mech parts and the armor plating of the soldier seem to be made of sheet styrene (very easy to work with/sand/glue/heat/bend) like Plastruct.

http://www.plastruct.com/

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Isaiah Sherman

May as well just had the concept team do 3d models. Most concept artists I know of nowadays are all quite proficient in either Max or Maya.

These are definitely badass, but the time investment seems out of scale.

pior

I would say not necessarily, especially if it is just one guy in charge - as that means that close to no revisions will be requested ...

Makkon

Wow! Great information, thanks Pior and TeriyakiStyle!

I got a good feeling about that plastruct material. Their ordering and everything seems old and outdated, but they probably sell through other retailers like Amazon. I love the fact that you can heat and bend it. That's very promising. Man this sounds like so much fun.

pior

Yeah - you can find it all over the US in brick and mortar hobby stores, and many online hobby stores carry it too

When it comes to gluing Plastruct panels together, you can use a special glue that pretty much melts/welds the styrene for a perfect fit. But of course superglue will work great too and might be faster and more practical in some cases.

seth.

for 1/6th kitbashing inspiration:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Snow-Corporation/161889887278934?ref=ts&fref=ts

http://blog.naver.com/systemgore

and the polycount of the 16th kitbash:

http://www.onesixthwarriors.com/forum/