Week 2 of University – King of the Dead Group Project Announced

So this week we got a new project, and it’s a group project, which is surprising since we’re in 3^rd year, what’s even more surprising is that its only 2 weeks long!

Basically our brief was to model a scene in UE4 with a Character on a Throne with a Wall behind them, and the Theme of the project was “King of the Dead” so we had to create a visualisation of a King of the Dead.

This would be a pretend art test to get into an indie company and if we created the project with original ideas and stayed away from clichés while keeping the idea awesome, we would be successful and be hired.

So we were put into teams of 5, but my team had 4 since the other member didn’t make it into third year unfortunately, but still it’s a nice mix of people.

I’m in a group with Ben Mowson, Tamsin Spick and Charlotte Clarke.

We had a rough start to the project because we all had different idea’s as to what King of the Dead could be, and as usual we kind of fell towards a Cliché which was a Voodoo style King of the dead or Queen of the Dead inside a tribal hut, mostly inspired by the scene in Disney’s “Princess and the Frog”

Concepts I made for the voodoo character 

We did a lot of research and mood boarding over the weekend, we all started to create our own concepts of what we thought the king of the dead should be and Ben created some fantastic environment concepts which were really detailed, we all kind of got precious with our work.

But unfortunately when we presented our idea to Joylon and Mike and Emma our tutors they were advising us against the voodoo project and try to think outside the box instead of falling to the usual Cliché of existing cultures that have a relation with death that everyone would think of.

More concepts for voodoo version of king of the dead

We basically had way too much on our plate in terms of creating the character and environment, we were going to go for a hyper realistic scene in 2 weeks, which wouldn’t have really worked out well at all. So we scrapped the idea and started again.

I’ll just quickly go over what happened with the new idea in bullet points:

-          We started from scratch thinking of a new idea, Juggling ideas around, Charlotte had a few good ones such as King of the dead being a Giant cartoon stylised Knife around screaming fruit on a table.

-          A lot of brainstorming on the whiteboard and thinking of unique things but nothing all of us liked.

-          New Idea from Charlotte saying it could be a stylised scene of a kid playing call of duty in his bedroom, and hence since he’s killing players online, he is essentially a King of the dead.

-          Start the concepting stage again, we did it together really quickly, Charlotte drew a 2 min concept and it’s what we started to base it off.

Charlotte's 2 min quick concept 

Quick Whtiebox I made

-          Put together better concepts and started to image bash things together, I Built a very quick white box concept. We were heavily influenced by the stylised art done by Disney and Pixar. I was in charge of sorting out our colour pallet and so I spent time looking at cartoons and night scenes from Disney and Pixar movies.

Colour Pallet

-          Talked to the tutors about it and they seemed really on board with the idea so it’s all good.

-          We changed the gender of the kid to a girl since we liked the concept better.

-          We played around a lot with the composition to emphasize the King/Queen of the dead, by positioning the camera angle lower so the character casts a shadow on her throne/big chair. We also designed her headset in a way that it would make the shadow she produces look like she has devil horns.

-          We then finalized concepts, and started to design what the 3D models and assets would look like.

Concept by Ben Mowson

-          The Asset list was created, my job was to design and model the Floor, Wallpaper/walls, The Poster, coffee table and Console designs.

-          Ben was in charge of the character so he was spending all of his time creating that.

-          Charlotte was creating the TV and toys that were around the level while Tamsin was in charge of the Throne and some of the furniture like the big table and lamp.

-          I created the poster from the mood boards and started to model the console.

-          We got a team name “Battle Awesome Super Storm” from the poster I made. It’s B.A.S.S in short, a tote to the popular FPS franchise Call of Duty or CoD

Poster I made for the room

Since our team was small it was very easy to manage and keep up to date with how everyone was doing, we had a daily scrum every day and we were communicating with each other nicely. It was a 2 week project and the first major project so we were all working very hard which was great.