[Riot Art Contest] - Murli Soogrim
polycounter lvl 4
Hey everyone! thought I'd join in on the fun 
I'm quite new to 3d and have been working with it for about one year now so thought doing this challenge would be a great way to better on my skills.
I'm joining the environment category and will do a Turret and a creep den. I'll be updating this first post with the progress images as I work my way through. See you further down!
..oh and, constructive criticism is most welcome. Please give me feedback!!
latest wip:
I'm quite new to 3d and have been working with it for about one year now so thought doing this challenge would be a great way to better on my skills.I'm joining the environment category and will do a Turret and a creep den. I'll be updating this first post with the progress images as I work my way through. See you further down!
..oh and, constructive criticism is most welcome. Please give me feedback!!
latest wip:
Replies
So I scanned some of my sketches. Here are some thumbnails for the turret, and some further exploration of some thumbs I liked.
Designwise the first idea I got was for the turret to have something to do with trees and the sun, so that's what I started to explore. Currently we have a 2week production project in school so I'm combining that with this! That leaves me with very little time for concepting. Ideally I would like to spend two weeks on just exploring ideas, but don't got that right now.
Instead I will focus on building a strong foundation for my turret, and iterate on it later, perhaps getting into the fine detailing outside of school.
My process so far has been:
a) thumbnailing on my initial idea
b) taking some thumbnails further - kinda liked the idea with a snake curling itself around a tree
c) basic block-in in maya
d) overpainting the blockin for further concept exploration.
I'm liking the concepts I have so far, but not so happy with the distribution of detail. My distribution of areas of interest is quite chaotic now.. and I feel that the bark of the tree competes with the snakes body. It feels quite heavy.. looking at the turrets in-game there's a strong distinction between detail and supporting volumes, where as detail is concentrated to the upper area and the bottom half of the turret is left simple intentionally.
Riot kinda follows the same design-principles as in the dota 2 style-guide, with values gradually growing darker at the bottom of a model, keeping the palette concentrated to 2-3 colors, and focusing heavily on strong sillhouettes.
I'm trying to keep all of these things in mind when I design!
Feedback is most welcome!
Spot on! You could work that into your snake pillar by having the snake coiled tightly at the top of the pillar and loosely around the middle. Using thinner lines to describe the bark would also help.
I like the first of the three turrets the best. Keep going!
I would have really wanted to do the illustration category for this, but I don't have enough spare time for that, and since I could combine the 3d cateogry with school assignments I wanted to do that.
Looking forward to see what you'll be cooking up too!
pixelb - Thanks for the feedback! I've been exploring some other designs since last time that I'll post soon. Definitely keeping it in mind
some more progress in the turrett. Cleaned up the detailing a bit and trying to concentrate smaller shapes further up. I'm kinda liking the shield since it gives a nice weight to the turrett. It adds simple but nice complexity to the lower half, making it interesting, without competing for the upper half.
Still want to keep concepting, but will have to go into modelling.
The plan is to make a more detailed blockin in Maya, nailing the hardsurface stuff quite accurately. Then exproting the OBJ and take it into Zbrush to work in sillhuette and organic shapes a bit more. Then export back into Maya for retopping over the new OBJ.
More to come! as always, feedback most welcome
wip:
Anyhow! here's a quick wip. Not sure if I should try to get some asymmetry into the turret sculpt. Getting into modelling the snake now. More to come!