elbow deep

As "Dominance War V" approaches, [a sort-of annual game art competition] I went ahead and decided to dig up my submission from last year; figured this might be some decent content to kick off the new blog.

"Dominance War" [or "Dom War" as we like to call it around the office] is a world wide contest backed by industry sponsors. The focus is entirely on creating game art that adheres specifically to the limitations of today's hardware. [asset cost vs. platform processing power / memory] Therefore the goal is to create "game ready" models. This means that the end product comes from a process that mirrors the industry standard art pipeline.

Every year a new "storyline" is released at the start of the competition. Your character submission must fall within the guidelines of the established lore. I'll spare everyone the nerd-core details, but the general idea behind this thing is that game artists across the world [and aspiring game artists] band together with their friends and co-workers and represent one of several game industry art websites. Then participants post work-in-progress to a personalized thread on their chosen forum [for crits and comments] up until the deadline.

This competition marks one of the few times a year where I get to create art outside of a licensed product or franchise [which generally translates into going off the deep end and creating some bat-shit insane characters.]

Below are some initial concepts, model construction screen captures, and texture maps.

Meet "Shiv".