The Stone Breaker Flagship "Caldera"

The Caldera is the premier stone breaker currently seeing action in the northern territories. 

The Caldera acts as the spearhead for the navy's enforcement detachment. Capable of smashing through into coastal and tidal basins traditionally considered unassailable this breaker can clear a path at speed allowing for a dozen support vessels to follow in its cleared wake.

All cannons are elevated and loaded via mechanical assistance and can fire a variety of projectiles ranging from standard penetrators to explosive rounds that can be lobbed ahead to break up stonepack.

The ship is powered by a captive steam system for primary functions and arrays of sterling engines for auxiliary systems. A large central turbine around the collar of the superstructure also harnesses the strong convection current passed from the hull via heat pipes and acts to force air through the ship at high speeds.

The outer plating is created with an alchemic forging process that creates durable, insulated and most importantly, low reaction steel that molten rock cannot bind to.

This started out as a sketch on the iPad Pro using Procreate. At around the halfway point, the limitations of Procreate for compositing and effects were becoming insurmountable so I transitioned to Photoshop for the remainder which helped the workflow but hurt my time given.

This piece started off in the daytime because I felt like night + lava was a bit overdone on my end. But with the coaxing from some friends, I decided that the more dynamic lighting would be the better decision. All of these changes just added to the time spent waffling around without clear final vision.

  • Be careful turning first-draft sketches into final pieces.
  • The iPad Pro is great, but working on a large piece in 15-minute chunks every few days for over a month is a fast way to lose your vision and perspective on a piece.

Vacation Plein Air Attempts

I had the blessing and curse of taking 2 vacations this year. It wasn't easy to ditch the family and have some time alone but every so often I'd drop a flash bang and get out to try my hand digital painting out in the wild courtesy of my iPad Pro and Procreate.

I never did this kind of stuff even back when I drew traditionally so I am pretty far behind the curve.

Clark

After the 30th reading of Dr Seuss's "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish" the creepiness of the last page's image compelled me to render my own take on things. I kept my illustration pretty consistent to the book's image but ramped up the creepy by a few notches to help things along. Most of the work was done in Procreate on the iPad Pro and then finished in Photoshop.

The subject and style aren't really in my wheelhouse so I was interested in how my process would change working primarily on the iPad. Due to all the layer blending styles and Procreate's terrible non-existant folder and masking options the end result included 30-40 layers with very little structure or cleanup - and no easy path to flatten.

BYOB - SMG Concept

A big goal of ours for these weapons was to create something that was 80% plausible and 20% pure fantasy. In this way, all the weapons have proper alignments in regards to ammo feeding and ejecting however the reciprocating actions on top and moving magazines and magazine wells are purely there as juice for animation.

The SMG's secondary is a fairly slow moving missile that can help the player zone enemies at medium range or to blast down a few walls when need be.

 

Keep up to date with our progress atwww.bringyourownbase.com andhttps://twitter.com/anvilheadstudio

BYOB - Rifle Concept Art

Ever since I helped cofound Anvilhead Studios, a year or two ago I had to keep it on a back burner and devote what limited focus I could spare towards business dev and game design / project management.

Recently, due to some very generous friends, family, wife and a great state grant program I've been able to transition into a temporary full-time capacity to help us accelerate towards the launch of Bring Your Own Base's (BYOB) MVP release.

The default rifle shown here is one of the first pieces created in an attempt to polish our game up enough to stand out, but not so much that we run out of money and find ourselves without a solid game foundation - a tricky balancing act.

Keep up to date with our progress at www.bringyourownbase.com and https://twitter.com/anvilheadstudio

Grave Danger - Flying Ranged Enemy

Here is the ranged version of the flying enemy for the Train World. I wanted to add in a tech element that matched the world and give it a more armored feel so it will exist as more of a threat.

15 Frame idle animation - for when he is chilling.

Flying with intent.

Firing loop.

And a bonus 15m sketch. The prompts were for a vehicle with the tags "Loner" + "Prairie".

Grave Danger - Flying Melee Enemey

This was one of my first concept rounds at JB gaming - so lots of range trying to figure out the right mixture of scary and goofy.

We needed a generic flying enemy for Grave Danger's initial development. I started out a few months ago with a blob enemy covered in tentacles but didn't know enough about Spine to make it work. Here I am coming back to a more general purpose design with a bit more work under my belt and things are working out better.

I decided to animate the wings by hand and not with a rig due to the complexity of the perspective and animation, so started up drafting a few tests in Photoshop before drawing out the sprites and putting it all together in Spine. 

Initial test.

Initial test.

Revision 2 with the body assets blocked in.

Blocked in the wings.

'Slow' 15 frame idle animation. The up and down strokes are held for a few frames and the tips of the wings are deformed with bones for a bit more organic look.

Here is the desert skin in the "Aggro" animation. The mouth can't open much larger than this at the moment.

Next stop will be to duplicate this project and create a ranged version with a projectile weapon below where the tenticals are.

Update: Removed the blur on the wings for now at the suggestion from a friend and I feel that it matches the game style much better than before. It was his opinion - and I agree - that the path blur I was using before looked more like a DoF effect and not like motion! Thanks, John!

 

Also tweaked the wing membrane color for the desert themed bat. Will hold final judgement for when he is in game.

And a bonus melee attack animation I forgot to export last time.

Grave Danger - Enemy Skin Test WIP June 16 2016

Finally got around to adding in Spine's really solid skin system and applying it to the default enemy rig. 

Because the heads are all slightly different (and have different bones and animations) I had to kind of work around that by creating and attaching empty blank images to the skins for inactive heads. Im sure there is a better way but a brief search didn't reveal anything and we are on a deadline! This seems to work, but I'd love to know about other approaches.

The standard weakest 'train engineer' variant. Right now only the weapon, skin color, headgear and wrist strap are different, however if given the time I can make all the assets custom. 

Maybe a bit too aggressive for the game, but will see if it grows on me. I think he is pretty badass regardless.

Next step is to create a "Caster" / "Shaman" version and add in some more general use animations.

Grave Danger - Train Level WIP June 10 2016

Here are some early shots of all the pieces finally put together in Unity and set in motion along with an 80% final train interior asset set. 

Many of the exterior assets have simple scripts attached to jitter them in place however the wheels were animated in Spine.

Still has a lot of polish to go! Check out https://twitter.com/GraveDangerGame to follow along with development.

Characters and character animations were created by Tony Ferguson 

Currently the chairs are too big and nothing is animated, but things are snapping together pretty well. Other than the insane amount of layers to work with contraction and expansion things are pretty straight forward.