P Number: P12206538
DMU Email: p12206538@myemail.dmu.ac.uk
Email: ChrisTheJam@gmail.com
The epic city project for the finale. The brief is to create no more than four semi-stylised epic cities for a third person game set in the 1700s era with a fantasy affair likened to Final Fantasy in reviews. The brief doesn't make sense entirely, which I'm hoping has been done on purpose to give you creative freedom. The main error being the 1700s oxymoron mixed with Final Fantasy just causes confusion. Final Fantasy has all these futuristic cities so the brief must be trying to convey the idea that the game these concepts are made for is a JRPG. But then it already states that the game is third person so it's not really relevant. Just, 'Make four cities' would have sufficed.
I chose this project because it's my domain, it's what I'm used to. I could paint landscapes and cities happily all day. Someday someone might even pay me for it. It's what I know and I feel as if I've dabbled in other mediums on the other two projects enough. So it's time to get some portfolio pieces in. That was my intention all along, I want some more art to show off so I can potentially get hired. The end of uni is nearing and to be quite frank it's quite terrifying going into the world. I'd like to be at least a little bit prepared for it.
I began the project in a seemingly sensible way. My first city was constructed entirely in 3D so it would be easier to get shots from multiple angles consistently. Makes sense, but the only issue I had was once I'd finish rendering the 3D, I didn't know what to do. I had no direction for a painting. So I lost a couple of days worth of work because I thought I was working smart when I wasnt really working at all. After this I took an entirely new approach to the project. I needed paintings and ideas so I figured out one of the quickest ways to produce environment thumbnails. I layered random photos on top of each other for around twenty minutes until I saw something. It's like looking at clouds. Of course the only thing you get from the photos is the colour and composition. Around seventy percent of the painting is already finished at this point.
So from generating all these thumbnails I can pick out maybe six that give me a solid idea. A solid idea for a city and a solid idea for a painting. All I'm looking for at this point is a painting. I'm thinking very little about the actual city to overcome the initial issue of not knowing what to paint. This change of pace really saved the project at this point. Before this I had little to no clue as to how I was going to produce the work. That said, for more complex paintings in regards to perspective. I used 3D once I had a colour palette and idea down. I just made a few pieces of geometry to kit bash from, then placed them together and lit them. Then it was just a matter of painting things in and adding some kind of interesting light.
And then a lot of the other paintings were done with the looking at clouds technique and then subsequently polish up that sketch into something that looks nice and shows an idea. The 3D helped with perspective a lot. But it also hindered the painting a lot. Once it's rendered and pretty with ambient occlusion and you place it into your document. It's quite difficult to paint over it because it's essentially already finished. But you need it to match the rest of the painting so there's always this imbalance going on. One of the main things I touched on from the brief is most notably, it has to be an epic city. Scale. I had to produce scale and distance. An easy way to do this is to put people in your painting. But from a lot of angles it wouldn't make sense to put people on. So I had to compromise and find other ways of reflecting the scale. Fog, clouds and birds are the main ways I achieved depth. The further away, the more the ground bleeds into the sky and becomes bluer and lighter. So adding fog creates immediate depth. Birds are also really useful. Everyone knows how big birds are. On one painting my scale device was a boat which made no sense because the viewer has no idea how big the boat is. I later added lots of birds. Also things further away are generally less detailed. Which is helpful with the time restraints on the project.
In terms of time management I kind of fumbled at the beginning. Mainly down to not having a clue what I was doing. It's a difficult project. And if you're not into painting landscapes or cities you're in for a difficult ride really. With 3D you know what is expected whereas 2D as a hand in criteria is pretty alien. Ultimately from the project I think I produced at least four portfolio pieces. So when whomever looks through my portfolio will see lots of pretty concepts. And they are concepts. I hope they display the idea of the painting beyond the pretty colours because that's what it's for at the end of the day. The second week was essentially just polishing my pre-existing thumbnails. I was producing new cities around twice a week after the first week so I had a decent amount of time to polish these paintings after I had thought them up. The thumbnail process saved me entirely. And as much as I find it annoying and tedious to combine 3D and 2D it was incredibly helpful to envision these complex scenes with odd perspective. I'm very happy with the outcome. The only issue I think was I didn't know what I was doing for a while. But this is just because I've never done a project like this before, so I had to make my own direction even more so than usual.
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