Manta Sanctuary - 3D Environment

Update #3:

Unfortunately as my university project hits full swing I've spent all of my working time focussing on making it the best I can, so my time for this competition has been little to none and I won't be able to complete this scene for the deadline. However, thanks to this competition I have enjoyed diving into a fun side project and I promise to complete this scene - chipping away at it where I can spare the time!

I've loved reading and seeing all the other entries and I would have loved to finish my scene off properly because the judges were incredible this year and some of which I've followed their work closely in my learning! 

Thank you to The Rookies for the experience this year, and maybe i'll have more time in the next competition to reach a more final point. If you would like to see this scene complete, I will update it here once it finally gets finished and I will be uploading it to my Artstation as well. Best of luck for the rest of the entries, and I hope everyone is doing well! :)

Update #2:

Welcome back to the blog if you saw my initial post, unfortunately due to my university major project I haven't had much time at all to work on this contest and so I decided to spend a good few hours working up my block-out today as fast as I could, ready so that I can just push out my assets and get this completed hopefully in time!

Since last time I figured out a rough scale, although this has now changed a fair amount after updating the Manta sculpt to be closer to the concept, and adding in the landmasses in the Unreal scene. Here are some quick comparisons:

And after creating a few basic landmasses, I could then build up the landscape seen in the concept image. I also added very basic colour.

I also then scattered some of the building block-outs I had made prior to plan out my scene fully:

So now I had the issue of finding a way of tying together both of the concept images, as they show very different scenery: One with tall structures on rocky mountain hills and the other in a flatter and open space. I thought I could split the Manta in half, so the rockier side show in the concept is at the front and then the flatter area near the tail, and this way I can also have the spaceship crash down into the area near the tail and get a good compositional shot of the full environment! So here is my main focus view:

I like the composition in this shot following the Rule of Thirds - you have a the buildings on the hill and the crashed ship trail leading your eye up to that area, but then I plan to have a section of farmland in the bottom right to balance this out and also explain how the inhabitants survive on the Manta! Finally, the only other change I added was a quick block-out the the ship I intend to model for the Captain and Cornel to exit from.

My initial reference board is still very small, but I decided to get a few style references from Spyro so that I know how to target my assets polycount and texture detail and to be game-ready. I also did a couple hours of research into Manta ray anatomy and how they swim through the ocean, because ideally if I get the time I plan to give the flying Manta a basic 'Air-swimming' animation and give the scene real life! Also starting planning out the assets i'd need and my next steps.

Conclusion:

So next steps would be starting to complete working assets and not just block out pieces, completing the structure kit and  environment landmasses will be a big chunk of time. Texturing might also be a challenge as it's one of my weakest areas, but thankfully I might be able to keep it more simple from the style.

Overall, I am happy with the days progress, although I am unsure whether or not I will be able to finish the scene to the standard I want or even at all before the deadline closes, and this is mostly due to University taking priority and a small pinch of over-scoping my time! Although whatever I end up with, I will complete this project for my own portfolio and I am happy to compete and share the journey with the rest of you guys!

So I will catch you in the next update, where hopefully the environment will be coming together much more! Thank you for reading and encouraging me! :D

About Me:

Hello, my name is Alex and this is my first Rookies contest! I started creating 3D environments a year ago and I am currently a student at Birmingham City University studying Video Game Digital Art.

For this contest I want to really nail that "Wow!" factor and amaze with my environment, and after looking through lots of concepts I have decided to 'Manta Sanctuary' by Kory Lynn Hubbell - This piece really amazed me when I first saw it, a small cute village thriving on the back of a massive flying manta-ray type behemoth. 

Manta Sanctuary concept by Kory Lynn Hubbell

Aims:

My main goals with this piece is to really capture the busy and exciting world that lives on the Manta's back in style that stays true to the concept being calming and safe.

I plan to have an escape pod as the Colonel and Captain's entrance onto my environment, where it has crashed into the hillside with a streak of upturned dirt when the pod crashed into the ground. Hopefully a quick cinematic of the pod door opening onto the onlooking town, following the same feeling as the main village concept.

I plan to stick close to Spyro / Overwatch style art so that I can better plan how to keep each asset coherent with itself - this was one of my main struggles of my Grads in Games 2021 competition submission.

Starting Out:

Beginning the project, my main issue I wanted to solve was scale. I needed to understand how big the Manta should be, as well as the structures on the back compared to the Colonel and Captain so I decided to quickly sculpt out a blockout of the manta ray from a sphere in Zbrush and then some fast houses based off the concept in Maya and quickly get them into Unreal so run around and get a sense of size and scale.

So far, I've decided that the inhabitants on the island are likely much shorter than a real human size, so I've roughly got them and their houses respectively at half the size of a human counterpart, which means when the player is standing in the environment they also get a much better scale shown below:

Screenshot above shows the comparison between buildings that would fit a 2m tall inhabitant (first image) and buildings that would fit a smaller 1m inhabitant (second image). The second image has proportions which better suit the concept and it'll help emphasise the cute and safe feeling if the structures are smaller and less dominating above the player.

Thanks for Reading!

I will update this post regularly as I work on this alongside my final major project for my University course! Today was a good day of planning out scale and size, and in my next updates I hope to be breaking down the environment in full and have a much more developed white box! See you there :D