Monday 24 March 2014

Kaiju chess piece development

We have been tasked to design a kaiju themed chess piece, my piece was the rook, I started out by brainstorming what would be appropriate.




Next up I created 3 prototype designs and then received feedback as to which I should develop, the end result was the third one and so I began creating some more designs based off of it.

The designs are based off of (left), the Japanese spider crab and the 'Shen gaoran' enemy from the monster hunter series, (right) a boar and (bottom) the final boss from my game.
The feedback was that the first design got 1 vote, the boar got 3 votes and the final design got 4 votes for final design and so I began adapting it.

I created a basic higher quality version of the design with relatively basic body parts at first each on separate layers (bottom to top(left arm, left leg, torso, right leg, right arm, left tusks(on a separate layer to the rest of the head to prevent weird shadows), head)). I used the 'drop shadow' effect to give each layer a thin outline so that you can tell each part from another easily.

The design looked a little plain so I created new layers over each body part, applied black and white brush and then smudged it to add lighting.
For more detail I used a large black brush with 0% hardness on the detail layers to create shadows for body parts that are layered above them, giving it a more realistic 3D look (I also redrew the ribs because they just looked bizarre).


I removed some detail to change it into a left side view 


Then I created a frontal view.