In Part I, we kicked off this series discovering how to quickly create concepts of a sci-fi style vehicle through the use of Thumbnailing, Marker Rendering, and Underlay Construction. We’ll pick up from there and cover two more techniques you’ll want to add to your repertoire.
Our subject matter here is an ‘Adventure Toy’, rendering a type of adventure toy, but really, this process and these techniques can be applied to any product you’re interested in creating visuals of. Just keep that in mind. So, there are two techniques we can use to convey a concept that will compliment what we learned in the first part of the series. Today, we’ll look at the process of photobashing, combining multiple photos for quick concepts, and Line Work, using minimal lines and shading to convey shape.
Episode 4: Photobashing
Here I cover how I make my concepts come to life. Using a simple stack up to create an underlay, I render my AirDran Mech concept, adding all the bits to hold the toy together. I cover the art of creating backgrounds to set the mood for the mechanized creations and add some quick and dirty Swiss alpine inspired photobashing to ideate a moon filled icy alien landscape.
Episode 5: Line Work
Here I render out my JackStar concept, a classic two legged walker, on a jungle world. This concept was started using PowerClix to visualize a particular shape. Using hand drawn line work I show you how to block in minimal marker values to build up the toy to give it a readable form. I also covers the importance of line work to make the form read and come alive on the page. For the background, I discover the vanishing point of the original drawing to determine the horizon line and block in the scene. I draw inspiration from an amazon rainforest image to create an easy jungle scene using the underlays color palette to pick values from. It’s all set to some creepy experimental off world minimalist music too. I show how the whole scene is composed and edited with color adjusted to create the final composition.
Stay tuned for Part III of the series where we’ll explore more rendering techniques and look specifically at rendering a range of vehicles. Subscribe to my Youtube channel here and follow me on twitter @botzendesign.
