THRONE ROOM – The Borrowed Throne – Robert Kempinski

urban_elf

Hey everyone,

I'm not very active here, but this contest really got my juices flowing if you pardon the phrase. I've tried a couple of contests before but never got very far.

My idea is the throne room of a race of miniature humanoids who take stuff from the bigger world to make their stuff with. Think the 'Borrowers' but perhaps a little more refined. Most of the time when this kind of thing is shown, it's all tatty and worn stuff, but I want this to be the royal family and have some really nice things turned into their thrones and the room it's in. Fancy coins, jewellery, lace, gold etc.

I was thinking the room should be under the floorboards of some palace or castle, but I won't be making this area, just a thing to think about while planning.

Really excited for this one, hope to have some block outs soon. I don't draw very well, so I'll just start straight in 3D.

:poly121:



EDIT: I will be using the following software -

3ds Max
Substance Designer
Substance Painter
Marmoset Toolbag 2

And maybe -
Photoshop
Xnormal

urban_elf

With regards to the actual thrones, I have a few ideas that I like, but need a bit more time to ruminate them.

I am going to try and think about the whole environment first, and I'm thinking that the setting behind the thrones should be a clock. A nice old fashioned mantel clock. I have looked at a few and picked out some that I think would be a nice fit for the environment, and some that have nice materials. I will probably have to block a few out and see which one might look the best with everything else.

urban_elf

I spent a few hours on this clock so far, and it's starting to come along. I'm planning on having glass in the middle, but there's still a lot to do on it. I think it's going to be a good centrepiece for me to build the room around, and next I'll start blocking that out and give myself a break from the clock.

urban_elf

I'm little slow thinking of ideas and getting stuff done, so not much progress.

I've been looking at some fancy chess boards, because I did want some nice tiled flooring and it made perfect sense to me. So now I've started a very simple block out to take this into account. I have the clock idea, which hasn't changed since before, and used that to centre the scene. The lead up to the thrones has the chess boards (or simple check patterns at the moment,) and either some chess pieces or toy soldiers etc. on each corner. I tried the whole outer rows and it was too busy.

There are a few things you can't see in the pic, but it'll probably be changed a lot to get a better final shot, so nothing much missed.

urban_elf

My plan was to have 2 thrones, king and queen, but not sure if that's allowed, so I've asked in the Q&A thread and am just waiting on a reply.

In the mean time, I've been thinking more about the chessboard idea and I think a part of the throne should be made from chess pieces. So I'm just working on that now.

Also I've been thinking about the actual seat part of the throne and I'd like it to be comfy, so the only thing I could think of that small is a pincushion. I've looked for some antique ones and am really liking the idea. Something like the picture below.

urban_elf

Here's my quick king and queen chess pieces. I may not use the queen if only one throne is allowed. Also I will probably make some more pieces for other things, but I haven't done any others yet.

urban_elf

I've researched a bit more and used some creative license to design this small pincushion that I want to use as the seat portion of the throne. I like the design but am not sure if it's too low poly. Lots more experimenting to do

urban_elf

I wanted the back of the chair to be something comfortable, but I was having a lot of trouble thinking of something that would work. There's quite a few things that work if you take into account hard surfaces, and for a while I thought maybe to just do like a matchbox or some small box as the back. I got to looking on-line and found some images of clasp purses, and thought that would be a perfect fit. I am so glad a persevered because I think my other ideas were a bit tacky and wouldn't fit in with the opulence I'm going for.

So here's a quick test. The clasp bit is a little flat, but I'm hoping that it will be ok when textured. I don't mind modelling something more complicated if I have to though

urban_elf

The Back was looking a bit small, so I wanted to fill it out a bit somehow. Tall small flat things are scarce, but I thought that cutlery would work nicely. The result is looking ok to me, and the fan like design was a bit of a nice accident.








Also, I'm blown away with the amazing work people are doing for this comp, I wish everyone the best of luck

urban_elf

It might be a bit flip floppy of me, going back and forth, but the clasp was worrying me that it wouldn't go through the pipeline very well, so I've done a bit of texture testing. This is the process I'm going to use for pretty much everything for the contest, and it's very quick for me, but perhaps not the best looking results, we'll see.

Firstly I should mention that I own the Substance indie pack, and I love the software to bits. I started off in Substance Designer to get a fabric and basic metal on to the purse.



It's looking extra flat now, but the next step will fix that. I took it into Substance Painter and imported the Designer maps. Then I made a new folder with the clasp area masked out and started painting on some normals. I don't have any in between shots, but this is what I ended up with



I then exported that normal back to Designer so I could bake world space normals, curvature etc. and back in Painter use them to get some depth and such and just generally worked the textures a bit to my liking.





It's really a lot better than I thought it was going to be, so I'm happy. It will probably be tweaked for when I get into properly setting up the environment, but at least my mind is a bit more at ease with how the process will go.

urban_elf

I forgot to mention, but I got a reply to my question and they said 2 thrones is fine yay. So I quickly put this second one together for the queen.

I based the pin cushion part on the ref I found and made it circular, which then lead me to having to make the purse smaller. I didn't want the big fan back for the queen, I thought it should be more modest (the king's showing off!,) so I just went with 3 coins on top which I think is a perfect balance between the 2 extremes.