Introduction

Hi, my name is Michael Andrews. I’m a 20 year old game student from northern New Jersey. Currently I’m in my junior year at Champlain College majoring in Game Art and Animation. Specifically, I specialize in hard surface prop modeling, texturing, and environment art. Up until now I have only worked on projects for school, making various props and environments to further my artistic and technical skills. The Champlain game program has really given me the tools I need to be successful after I graduate. I just finished a semester in Montreal where I studied under Vincent Joyal who really helped me understand environment art and taught me what it takes to produce acceptable work.

Project

At the beginning of every project, I first look at the big picture and decide what the main aspects that I want to capture are. Working off of the concept by Giorgio Grecu, I knew from the beginning that what I really wanted to capture was the scale and the atmosphere of the piece. I decided that the lighting, architecture, and smoke/fog were the things that really made this concept pop out to me. Capturing these were the main challenges I faced during this project. One of the more tangible challenges I had to deal with was what to do with the foreground. I decided to not include people in the piece so that left me with a large, open, flat space that really detracted from the composition. I resolved this by adding levels to the ground plane in the form of stairs. I also added benches, a fountain, an extra archway, and small leaves and other details to make space feel populated. Other than the foreground, the other main task was the sheer number of modules and the scale of the architecture itself. That was just a matter of hours and making the modeling interesting but still believable.

Architecture

One of the reasons I was so interested in doing this project was because of the architecture. I really love modeling and the idea of doing intricate victorian architecture was really exciting. The concept I was working off of was also loose in some places so I could take artistic liberty with the detail and construction in those areas. To start production I brought the image into Photoshop and measured the approximate height of the buildings. By keeping the units consistent I found that this technique is really helpful for making sure everything is in scale relative to each other. Sometimes I would round up to exaggerate certain aspects and make the scene bigger. At this stage I worked with large cubes to block everything in. Once I achieved the scale and the perspective I was looking for, I started modeling. Most of the modules are fairly simple on their own. While some of them are complex, its when they all come together and compliment each other do they form interesting architecture.