Infinity started out as a sequel to the Toy Story 3 toy box mode, but we always wanted to do a pirate-themed area of the world. This was all before we got approval to use the Pirates of the Caribbean so our exploration didn't have much to do with that.
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| Some of the most early stuff was suggestions for gameplay, because we had nothing from the designers yet. |
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| We had to come up with our own Pirate toys, and making the characters funny monster fish seemed right. Definitely inspired by the second movie. |
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| Toy story was way more about what type of toy they are and how that affects the interaction. Sadly, we abandoned a lot of that once we switched to Infinity to support the collectible style of the toys. |
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| The world and gameplay was a lot different back then. A lot simpler, actually. |
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| At some point (even pre-Infinity) we moved the style over to something more realistic for the environments. |
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| An attempt at the overall layout of the main pirate island. This was all built and in the game, but nothing translated over to the final game. |
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| We had other islands back then, but they were very simple, like some of the smaller islands in the current Infinity Pirates playset. |
Love the tree designs.
ReplyDeleteWow! Unbelievable how much cool stuff ended up not being used at all.
ReplyDeleteThis must have been one insanely long-running project judging by the amount of exploration and development that you did on it.
I am very impressed with how the levels of detail change between the different approaches. Did you find it tough to change tack from very simplified to more realistic styles?
Love your use of shapes Sam. It's always a pleasure looking at your work! Cheers for sharing!
ReplyDeletePartly in response to your post about commenting, I wanted to leave you a comment!
ReplyDeleteThis is just sort of a general comment and not specific to this post. But here you go.
I wanted to let you know what an incredible inspiration your blog has been to me! When I first discovered it... oh, I don't even know, probably a couple of years ago, I was totally blown away by your rendering skills and your understanding of lighting. When you started posting tutorials and instructional stuff, it was... eh, how to put it?... totally invaluable and artistically life-changing. Yeah. That.
I'm on a mission to improve my own light-color-3dimensionality-rendering skills, inspired a lot by the principles you've talked about. So, thank you! Thank you for keeping and active blog and for filling it with such beautiful and useful material.
Cheers!
Thanks Adam!
ReplyDeleteBenjamin: I think we did around 9000 concepts for Infinity. Tons and tons of unused concept art.
Dane: Thank you!
Lindsey: Thank you so much, and I appreciate you taking a little extra time to comment. ;)
Would really love to see the process behind the island environment (fourth image down), the lighting is really effective.
ReplyDeleteShane: I think I started with a really rough 3d model, but other than that there wasn't really a process. I build up the lighting in layers usually, but in this case I just painted straight ahead and added detail in the second pass.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the insight Sam. Do you use 'color' layers over the greyscale render or do you just paint opaquely over the top?
ReplyDeleteI''m very much a 'build the lighting up in layers' kind of painter so I'd be interested to see if you find painting straight ahead saves a lot of time in the long run.
Shane, sorry I didn't see your comment until now. The grayscale stuff I get from the 3d guys is usually incredibly rough, so using a color layer over the top would just give you colored polygons. So yeah, I usually paint opaquely over the top.
ReplyDelete