Exterior Concepts

Here are some simple pencil concepts of the exterior, and the bridge. I'm trying to work in diagonal parallel lines and the circular fortress symbol wherever I can. From here I'll start working on the bridge, and work outwardly from there. 

A Northern Resort : Proof of Concept

Right now as an artist, I want to find a job in the game industry. Therefore the goal of this project is to demonstrate my skills as an environment artist to potential employers, the best way to do that of course is to show them. This will be an in game environment, playable in browser, of current generation graphical quality.

This environment is a resort fortress, located high in the snow covered mountaintops. Wedged alongside a clifftop and a river. It's a gorgeous destination for the visitors that travel from far away to enjoy its spas.This resort comes from one of my Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, and built by one of my characters, which is why I'm choosing this place specifically. It's a place that I have a passion for, and an environment I want to see come to life. Due to its size and locale, it presents a pile of challenges, most I'm excited to tackle, and all will help me hone and show off my skills.

This models will be made using ZBrush, 3DS Max, and Topogun. Overall I expect to use a healthy mixture of Max and ZBrush, but the goal is to use ZBrush as much as possible, not only to better reflect current workflows, but to hone my ZBrush skills. Textures will be made in Photoshop and I will be experimenting with Allegorithmic's Substance textures. The environment will then be lit and run in Unity, and then exported to flash player where it can be uploaded to my website and then played.

I want to be able to show off finished work as soon as possible, therefore I will focus on small chunks at a time, taking them from concept to completion and then moving forward.

For this first stage I created proxy geometry in that makes up the foundations and basic dimensions of the fortress as a whole. First I started by creating a top view map layout:

First Floor

Second Floor

From there I created the created the geometry itself, as well as a test asset and some simple point lights to make sure that everything would work well in browser. Currently my biggest concern is frame rate and loading time with the final product, since final assets will be of a higher quality in polygon size and possibly texture size. Once the first room is finished I think I'll be able to more accurately find a mitigation for this issue.

Test Asset alongside Proxy Geometry

You can click the link below, and traverse view the proxy geometry for yourself. You move with basic first person controls, looking around with the mouse and moving with W, A, S, D. Mouse movement will always be recognized, but keyboard movement will only be recognized after clicking on the frame. 

http://ryanvsand.com/Proxy%206-11-2012/Proxy_6-11-2011.html