Dominance War IV: Main Challenge Begin!

It's time for the Main Challenge of Dominance War IV. It's another character design/render, and this time we have 3 races to choose from with 3 classes in each race. I've looked them over and decided that I will do either a Demon Lord or a War Machine - both are supposed to be huge creatures bristling with weapons or magic or demon-whatever.

Tonight I started doing some shapes and silhouettes of Demon Lords to see what kind of ideas I could come up with:



Yep, that there's quite a pile of ugly, to be sure. I like most of these enough to go to a more detailed sketch phase, especially the ones up top. I'm the kind of weird guy who, when someone says "do a demon," I want to do something that is not human-shaped or possibly not even vaguely humanoid at all. Something really nightmarish and mind-bogglingly hideous. If there's one complaint I have about Dominance War, its that the competition really favors some particular types of humanoid characters. I like to buck trends like that... of course, it may mean that no matter how well-designed and rendered my piece is, it won't make the cut.

Anyway, I'll be continuing this work on my UStream Live Video channel most weeknights from 9-midnight and Sunday afternoons from 3-6pm Pacific Time, from now until the end of the contest, which is May 11th. Tomorrow night (Wednesday 4/15) I'll be continuing with some design work on War Machines.

Here's my official contest entry thread on CGSociety, too.

Environment Class, Week 1

I'm taking an Environment Design course at the Concept Design Academy in Pasadena, taught by Brian Yam from Insomniac Games and John Wu from SCEA. Just trying to sharpen up my work a bit, do some different things, learn some new techniques and approaches, and maybe put together a few more portfolio pieces.

Over the course of the class we'll be developing pieces for a pretend game development project, which involves enormous mobile cities that travel around the world via land, air or sea looking for resources and fighting with each other.

First week's assignment was to thumbnail out some very rough ideas:



it was supposed to be just line art sketches, so I sorta did it wrong by doing these little value paint sketches, heh. I do line art stuff all the time, I wanted to do it a little differently.