Natural Environment Project: Blockout

Now that we're beginning our tracks in earnest, the 3D Art track is focused on creating a natural environment based around a preset story. The idea is that the Earth's moon has been terraformed and anthropomorphic animals have built societies on its surface, and humans are able to inhabit the consciousnesses of some of those animals, some of which are a race of bipedal tortoise people who live in a setting reminiscent of ancient Mesoamerica. We've been split into three teams: environments, props, and characters. I'm working on props, and I chose to work on a particular kind of weapon called a macuahuitl.

To start, I took a look at the reference board we were all given to start off, and compiled my own reference boards for the overall design of the weapon and potential inspiration for some unique features. I didn't want to get too creative with the design; the weapons in the original reference are largely realistic and muted, with mostly skulls, bones, and rope for ornamentation.

 

I also did some research on the history and construction of the macuahuitl, taking note of the materials and processes. As I found in my research, there are no authentic macuahuitls left, so the best we can go off of are contemporaneous accounts and drawings. I watched a video recreating the construction of the weapon using the closest the forgers could get to the methods used by ancient Mesoamericans, and it was really helpful in figuring out how the blockout would work (and eventually, the final sculpt and model).

 

I then sketched out a design to model from. The decorative carvings will come later in the process—I based them on one of the reference images I found, but wanted to utilize some sun and earth imagery; for a society on a terraformed moon, it made sense that those might be prominent symbols or even deities.

I then did the blockout model construction as pictured at the top, then imported it into Unreal Engine to check the scale.

This assignment requires us to work on the same project in Unreal using Perforce, where we submitted our exported .fbx and Maya files.