BEAT-EM-UP | Metta
Alright, I'm in.
Environment: Wonderland Beat-em-Up
After drinking from the mysterious bottle, Alice finds herself no bigger than a dormouse and must brawl her way through the woods of Wonderland towards the Red Queen's Castle. Expect giant teapots, mushrooms and a whole lot of color.
We all know Wonderland has been done, but the subject matter is engaging to me and so I'm more likely to finish, as bad as that sounds. The environment will be slightly stylized. All textures will be hand-painted. Overall, I want the environment to feel vibrant, whimsical and playable.
Challenges:
- Haven't worked with UDK for several years and so this will be a refresher course for me.
- I want the environment to feel ALIVE. I want a moving element or two in the level. Butterflies flapping their wings, clouds scrolling, etc. I have no idea how to animate anything in the UDK editor, so that will be another challenge for me.
- Not sure if I'll be doing a sky box or some sort of stylized matte painting for the background. It seems to me that a matte painting would be really texture-space heavy, but I'd have to test it.
- Create solid concept art to show concept-to-completion process.
- Finishing with a solid portfolio piece that will demonstrate my concepting abilities and hand-painted texture skills.
To Do:
* Create style map
* Concept individual pieces; decide what pieces will be modular
* Research how to create moving meshes in UDK
* Model/UV/Texture (Rig, if necessary)
* Set up scene in UDK
* Light, particles, set up camera, record scrolling video.
Wish me luck, I'ma need it.
Environment: Wonderland Beat-em-Up
After drinking from the mysterious bottle, Alice finds herself no bigger than a dormouse and must brawl her way through the woods of Wonderland towards the Red Queen's Castle. Expect giant teapots, mushrooms and a whole lot of color.
We all know Wonderland has been done, but the subject matter is engaging to me and so I'm more likely to finish, as bad as that sounds. The environment will be slightly stylized. All textures will be hand-painted. Overall, I want the environment to feel vibrant, whimsical and playable.
Challenges:
- Haven't worked with UDK for several years and so this will be a refresher course for me.
- I want the environment to feel ALIVE. I want a moving element or two in the level. Butterflies flapping their wings, clouds scrolling, etc. I have no idea how to animate anything in the UDK editor, so that will be another challenge for me.
- Not sure if I'll be doing a sky box or some sort of stylized matte painting for the background. It seems to me that a matte painting would be really texture-space heavy, but I'd have to test it.
- Create solid concept art to show concept-to-completion process.
- Finishing with a solid portfolio piece that will demonstrate my concepting abilities and hand-painted texture skills.
To Do:
* Create style map
* Concept individual pieces; decide what pieces will be modular
* Research how to create moving meshes in UDK
* Model/UV/Texture (Rig, if necessary)
* Set up scene in UDK
* Light, particles, set up camera, record scrolling video.
Wish me luck, I'ma need it.
Replies
All concept art for mood sheet © their respective owners
Set up a mood/color sheet and started to concept. Might add one more screen to this.
Your level concept is great, maybe add a few small foreground elements between the camera and playable area to help sell the depth.
Just needs some color but this is the final design.
good luck man.
One of my goals for this project is to create solid concept art in order to show my entire process, so the next few posts will be concept sheets of certain assets in the environment, followed (hopefully) by the colored version of the level itself.
The following is concept art for the pick-ups in the level (to be modeled & textured) and a mock-up of the UI character portrait (added later to screens in Photoshop.)
Thanks for looking!
Here's a video of the level in the editor.
Bishop: Thanks, Bishop! I'd put the hatter's hat in the background but I have it in the middle ground and two hats in one level may be one hat too many.
The many weeds of Wonderland, to be modeled and duped around the level ^
^ Painted level so far. Still very much working on it.
This looks like it should convert well to the UDK , looking forward to seeing more!
Kharn: Your comment made me think a lot more about my original ground design and I realized that putting the chessboard smack dab in the middle of the level doesn't make much sense. So now I have the terrain fading from grass to a broken marble chessboard as the level progresses. Thanks for pointing this out to me!
This is just the level block-out, done in Maya. Much of the foliage is missing (alpha), but I have the bigger pieces marked & placed, the Cheshire-moon in its position. Most of my actual models are nearly done. I plan to have them all finished and ready for ZBRUSH by Wednesday, then onto texturing.
Wonderland Blockout video: http://vimeo.com/14740574
Thanks for looking!