There are several things I will have to figure out before I can start making the actual models.
In this post I will create a list of things I used/will use to get the narrative for my art.
Concept art
Concept art is the best way of quickly getting multiple ideas on how you want things to look in general. This is completely seperate from what the outcome will be when the Narrative will be included but it gives you a nice way of making your own inspiration or Ideas you would like to incorporate into your work.
Besides your own work you should also collect inspiring images from other artist that interest you. Ofcourse it helps narrowing the search down if you already set a theme.
In my case my base theme was "Sci-Fi" but later on we added "Overgrown" to it as I haven't done much organic modelling yet and this would be a great opportunity to learn it. So in my case it will be a nice mix of hard surface and organic modelling.
Example of my art wall in its current state (I will give more pictures in future post as I fill it up)
Creating the story
Most important is that I write out a small story that the art will/should tell. My max is one A4 page to limit myself. You should set a limit too because you can get carried away with writing a story pretty fast. And the story itself is not our main focus in terms of an end result.
First thing my teammate and I did was settle on these three points:
- Location
- Objective of the players (in our case teams) > Why are they there?
- Time
This will give us a base to build a story on.
In our case the location is an overgrown city where the players will infiltrate an "abandoned base". The objective of Team A is to reach the core and collect schematics, they are scavengers that travel around for lost "treasures" that might give them a fair bit of coins. Team B are the androids that were left there and are still active to defend the base from intruders.
More Concept art
Once you have your story all written up you will need to make specific concept art based on that story (basically incorporating it into your assets for the first time). There are multiple ways on creating a story into your work. I will do research (Analysing other maps and examples) on what these ways can be and make a more detailed post on this subject. I encourage you to do it yourself too as there might have been new ways or good examples created by the time you read this.
In my case I will also receive a blockout of the designed map at some point where I will base my concept art on too. But meanwhile I will continue making atmospheric images to get a good feeling for it.
In the near future
Since I am still in my concept fase I haven't planned exactly yet how I will start modelling. Since I will be making an entire multiplayer map in my case I will start making modular models that I can easily place in the world. Ofcourse there will be new discoveries and ideas once I'm further into my own process I will post new updates.