Element 2 Week 9:

I started by making a temporary gun/spear for my statue so I could place it in the scene and get a sense of scale and see how it looks alongside the rest of the scene. I wanted a stoic militant vibe that felt imposing to the player height.

I like how it has turned out I applied my metal texture in the meantime as I haven’t produced my stone material but in doing this I realised the reflectivity of the material was a nice touch and could look really cool with some warm candlelight.

I will Red line over my shots to establish where I could have some candles.

I initially thought I could use my soldier statue but concluded it may be overly used if that was the case so it maybe be better to make a captain variant of them. I also wanted to make them symmetrical for this first attempt.

I re-posed the model added a sword for them to hold and made a helmet variation for a more senior / ancient looking soldier. I took this into ZBrush and used the Bas-Relief tool which allows you to take a model and turn it into an Alpha which I could then use to either mask or drag select onto my model. I added some hand drawn ornamental tracery based of some gothic examples.

I then made a cracked version of this which would have the skulls beneath it and then I bake the high poly down onto that.

Here you an see the result I am happy with how it turned out but will definitely need some material tweaking as its a bit glossy and I still am unsure if it would be better off with stone rather than metal.

The next point of call was to make a shrine area I was inspired by this concept piece from Trench Crusade, where there is a shrine withholding a heavy artillery round this gave me the idea to have a prayer/shrine area where they would go to bless their artillery/ammunition rounds before battle

I decided I would start by making the Reliquary (also referred to as a shrine, by the French term châsse, and historically also referred to as a phylactery) is a container for relics.)

I started with this 6 sided reliquary shrine but did feel it would maybe cover up the relic itself too much and make it harder to read, I was also really struggling with how to close the roof of it. Then my project crashed and corrupted which I took as a sign to restart this piece which I feel was the right choice.

Here is was the first attempt I decided to add a sturdy foundation and some more interest to the arms that hold up the top as well as a few steps up towards it.

Also baring in mind Josh’s feedback again of making use of negative space and having some heigh variation in different locations I decided to add a raised section for this shrine area with stairs up to it.

Here you can see the results of that in engine.

I tested out a wooden texture for the Reliquary just by reworking one of the StarterContent wood materials. I am not sure if it fits so it may be something I will come back to edit in future.

The next task is to populate the area with different munitions so I started making some ammunition crates, warheads and the main big artillery round.