Game Art - Diorama Part 1

Yes, I really should have started uploading my progress a whole lot sooner than I actually have.. so much for the promise of keeping up to date this time!

But still, I'm going to make it my mission over the weekend to upload as many steps in my work as physically possible. With that out of the way, let us begin.

Planning

Our assignment was to create a 10 foot by 10 foot diorama of our own choosing, using our skills picked up from the pirates chest assignment to build a small scene, making sure that objects and scenery were to human proportions. A little something that seems incredibly obvious and simple, but as many of us discovered... the limitations of the diorama proved challenging as less could be fit into the space then one could have imagined.

Case in point, I was originally planning to design a Edo period shrine using hand painted textures, with a little river and a bridge, as inspired by the influences Spirited Away had on my pirate's chest. However, although I'd presumed that I would have enough space... it turned out that I really did not. I downright rejected an alternative idea of a diorama based on where one of my notebook characters Bill Dup lives (seen briefly in the image below as a half arsed windmill and fence)



Early ideas for a spirit shrine or the home of Bill Dup.

I continued along the route of the shrine until I simply felt that I wouldn't be able to do my idea any justice, given how much would have to be removed in order to make it fit. It was around this time that I suddenly decided to work on a diorama based on Fallout : New Vegas. A game series that has always taken my interest and it seemed so very obvious to me that I could create something visually interesting.


However, it was still too large for the dimensions!

The scene remained larger, but the lower right sketch was about the time I settled on a scene that would fit into the dimensions and still prove visually interesting.

So by this point, I'd started testing object sizes within 3DS Max, and began to feel that a lot of my objects were far too simple and geometric. As I will show in the next part of this blog, I decided to move from wooden walls to log walls, and turned a basic table into something more complicated... a dressing table.

Also at this point, I was still debating whether to take a painterly approach to my work or use photographed textures. I eventually leaned towards painting my own from scratch simply due to wanting to experiment with art style... as well as try and learn to do something I've not done before. So basically, I was working towards a Fallout style scavenger hut with a more Team Fortress 2 inspired art style.

In the next part!...

I go over the process of making some things. Whee.