Research

Okay, so we received the brief for our new project today but before I get on to that I first wanted to just upload a few more things to do with the major, mostly research but a few concepts as well.

First off is the research I've gathered for the barbarians. Now, most of this research (the stuff for the soldiers and dragon as well) is more a gathering of inspiration and general styles that I had in mind. When it comes to diving in a bit more depth into the specifics I might grab some more reference for that as well, things like swords and armour etc. For the barbarians I have been heavily influenced by the various concept work for Warhammer Online and also Kekai Kotaki's brilliant work on the Guild Wars franchise. We weren't too sure how much armour we wanted these guys to be sporting, especially seeing as that would be more in keeping with the soldier's visual style instead. A bit more of an armoured style will probably be reserved for the chieftain concept.

Now the soldiers, these guys were pretty awkward surprisingly. We obviously wanted them to be armoured but too much armour would require some pretty technical rigging and as none of us are experts in this area we thought it probably be best if everybody wasn't clad in a full suit of plate mail for example. For these guys I'm kinda drawn between the 16th century European style of the Warhammer concepts again and those that perhaps sport more heavily armoured figures. Another problem other than the rigging side of things though is that a lot of these guys feature pretty elaborate armour in some places, and although visually this would be pretty nice it would then fall to us to have to work these intricacies into our models and again the rigs.

That's right, we may have put a dragon in there as well, not sure whether you noticed in the animatic hehe. So yeah, basically we were kind of struggling for a way to end our little sequence in a way that wasn't anti-climatic but was also manageable. I may have just thrown the idea of a dragon out there and obviously we got excited and it's now stuck. Whether we manage to pull it off or whether we bit off more than we can chew will remain to be seen however. Anyway, here's a bunch of reference I gathered for the big lizard. We are pretty sure we want to go with the two legged variety of dragon, mostly for design reasons I guess but it will also mean less limbs to rig so that will help. I've obviously looked up a bunch of different reptile features as well but we won't really know much more about this guy until one of us starts knocking out some concepts for him.

Last but not least (well, kinda) I've put up some research for the environment. This is an area we haven't put too much time into yet, but it's on the to do list. I've looked up military camps in general but also various tents and props that would really help sell this world we are aiming to create. I initially imagined it being set in a bit of a clearing as well so that's why there's a bit of research for that, but this also means that the camp obviously would not be as big as some of the camps in these images.