King...Queen of the Dead

It's almost Halloween, that time of year every dentist hates; kids running around asking for sweets in their homemade costumes spooking all the neighbors(well not really but don't tell them that!) What better way to  begin October with such a spooky project, or so we thought...

 "King of the Dead" - what does it mean to you? To me I see a big looming guy on his chair of skulls, or maybe a throne of corpses from the zombie apocalypse with the human smugly sitting, guns in hand and smoking upon his kills. You get the idea, some big scary presence on a big scary chair looming over his subjects. However the title does not have to be taken so literally... Which you will see a little later on.

So first we got into our groups and brainstormed, pinterested(?) and designed our original ideas, going down the route of voodoo and New Orleans, bringing up some interesting concepts. However we had the problem that everyone had different conflicting ideas of how the level should look, gender and design on the character and such, not only that but the level was becoming very dark and dull, it seemed overdone and boring. So we began anew...

Yeah this is an awful drawing, so why did I put it on here? Because this bad drawing is what began our chosen project, who could be a more fitting "King of the Dead" that a chubby 10/12 year old kid hiding in his room playing MMO game such as Call Of Duty or Halo online? of course he has to be good at it, but we all agreed that this idea could be pulled off and could work well. It was unique and interesting, plus we all pretty much knew how we wanted our level to look. Sure it had a lot of changes throughout.

Our level concept moved on quickly based around this idea, I found myself in charge of face concepts:

We decided to follow a pixar-style theme with our character, as there are so many examples of good character design throughout their productions, we didn't want to create a character who would look disturbing or unfitting, for example this:

Just no. So instead we concentrated on making everything more exaggerated and colourful yet still maintaining some realism.

Although I quickly left the character design to another member and moved onto asset design. In total I created five assets for our scene using 3DS Max, Mudbox, Photoshop and eventually UDK. This was another great chance to learn a new program. i am very late on the scene for using Mudbox but decided to finally give it a try for texturing and a little baking. The final results are as follows:

Two weeks, concepts and models complete our level looks good, yeah there are things we could've done better, but overall our team worked well together, kept in contact and overall produced a successful project. At the end