Another Year Another Project! - King of the Dead.

For this project, we were tasked with making a scene consisting of a throne, character and backdrop as a group; in my case, there were 5 in my team.. The title of "King of the Dead" was given to us and we had to produce a single image of the scene to show our whole vision as if we were a small outsourcing and concepting studio proving to a large company that we could work for them.

Once we knew the brief and specifications, we looked at exactly what it is we had to achieve. We looked at ways in which we could produce an original idea that didn’t focus too much on the classic ideals of a “dead king” or “king of the dead” that is portrayed so often in media today or in the past.

We began to brainstorm and research ideas and visual reference. Once we began to get some ideas we started to concept. We spent about 3 days mainly concepting a scene which fitted our vision, with our main focus on iteration. Therefore, every time we felt we were getting somewhere, we idolised what could be changed and iterated it further. This meant that our idea was constantly changing and helped us to discover ideas we hadn’t even thought of yet. During this time, I also produced a very rough whitebox of our layout.

We had a few ideas which we began to mix and so started to model what we had in our final concepts. We decided to split into different roles, which meant that I was modelling the pod, which was the main focal point of our throne. I worked alongside Rebecca who was working on the model for the rest of the throne. We talked about the stylisation of it to some extent. We had already decided that the scene would be realistic and give the sense that it was built by an ancient civilisation; with reference from the ancient Aztecs and the Egyptians.

I unwrapped the pod once I had finished modelling and textured the main body of it before creating a separate ice/glass shader for the pod’s screen material. I also created a lightmap during this process. We used google drive to pool all of our resources and to put finished models and textures, ready to import into Unreal Engine 4. I went back to our original whitebox and began to update the models. Once I’d placed some of the main assets, I then built the shaders using the textures I had been given and added extra nodes and branches in the shaders where necessary.

We then looked at all of our potential lighting conditions which I had previously experimented with and tweaked this to nail the mood we wanted for our final scene. After we had added post processing effects in engine and sorted our composition and camera angles, we had our final image.

I was actually very pleased with our final outcome and was pleasantly surprised at the way our concept continuously changed and flipped our entire mind-set almost everytime we discussed new concepts as a group. Although we did sometimes have a disagreement about which way we wanted to take the concepts, we worked well in finding quick solutions.