Radioactive Zombie Penguins pt 3 - Logo Concept Art

After creating our mood board and brainstorm, we started creating concept art besed on what we had learnt and things we had highlighted in the brainstorm. The concept art we have currently done was aimed mainly at drawing the penguin which has yet to be named.



In the first section of concept art we see a few examples of penguin designs, a concept of a cartoon style character with their brin showing, but msot importantly is a good example of a completed logo design which is a potential one we will use after it has been edited a bit.




The second set of concept art shows several designs of the penguin by 3 of the team members, myself, Robin and Harrison. The two larger images of penguins were drawn by Harrison after several other versions were drawn with one of the eyes hanging out. It is that style of penguin that will be used in the final version of the logo.




Again the concept art above is primarily just penguin/zombie designs done by all members of the team each drawn in their own styles.




The final shot is of all the concept art produced so far.

Radioactive Zombie Penguins pt 2 - Mood Board

We produced this mood board for inspiration with desdigning our own logo. We went through magazines and several books to find logos, symbols and images that inspired us, from well known logos - xbox, grand theft auto to more styled images such as the nun and the face on the left side of the mood board.
We chose between known logos and general images so we ahd a wider range of things to influence us. I found the images of the nun and the large face because they fit in the horror theme of our name, particularly with the zombie theme.
From this mood board we took several ideas and styles which we later s tarted to sketch out. We took elements of iconic symbols an shapes, horror inspired characters but also the cartoonistic styles of some other well known logos.

On the mood board, next to certain images we put key words about the logos and images t hat make them unique, for example - "cartoonistic", "iconic", "symbolic" and "unique"

Radioactive Zombie Penguins pt 1 - Brainstorm

Our team made this brainstorm to help lay out ideas on our team name, the colour scheme we want to use in our logo. We also lay out ideas on the kind of shapes our logo will be and the shapes it will contain.
The features section we list ideas on the style of imagery we are thinking of using, for example, we want a penguin to be in our logo, use the radioactive symbol as the primary part of our logo. Another feature we wanted to add to our logo was a glow effect to make the zombie penguin more unique.
For the colour scheme, we wanted to use a more earthly palette of greens, browns/reds, yellow, black and white. We chose those colours as we thought it would suit the logo and the overall style we want to achieve.
For the text style and fonts we want to have something that's horror themed, bold and interesting as the text is going to be just as important as the image is.

Sky Boxes

Today in class we created a new environment so we could start testing out how to make sky boxes. I did the same as in the previous post where I used both photoshop and 3D Max to create my environment


With my environment ready in 3D Max I created a geosphere that completely surrounded my environment. I cut the geosphere in half as the bottom half of the sphere wasn't needed. I moved the sphere on top of the environment.

The next step was to select all the faces of the sphere and flip the normals so the faces pointed inwards. That way when I put a skin on the geosphere, the image will face inwards towards the environment.

Environment Design

Today I created my first environment, not incuding the one my ship was set in.

Displacement Map
The first step in creating an environment was in Photoshop. I created a new document at 512x512 with 72 pixels/inch. That blank slate creates the base of what I am going to create. The first major step is to then fill the space in black, this will be the lowest points when the environment is put into 3D Max.
I select the brush tool and set the colour as a dark grey and start to brush on where you wan the next level/higher point in your environment. I then repeat the process each time choosing a lighter colour until I choose pure white to be the higest points in the environment and save the file as a jpeg. This is now your Displacement map.

3D Max: Displaceing An Environment

The next step in createing your environment is in 3D Max. I use standard primitives to create a place on which my displacement map will go on, but first I increase the number of length and width segments as this will increase its resolution. I set the segments to 100x100.
After creating the plane and changing the numebr of segments I go onto the modifier list and select displace. From the list of actions available, I click to add a bitmap image and select the jpeg I created in photoshop which is then applied to the plane. By increasing the strength of the displacement, the plane will begin to morph according to whta we did on the jpeg - the lighter sections of the image will rise up while the darker parts will remain low, this will turn into our basic environment.
I then changed the Blur level to smooth out the rough edges to my liking.

Texture Map
The environment looks a little dull at the moment so what we need to do now is add a skin to add colour to it.
We go back to our displacement map in photoshop and create a new save file, this new file will be our texture file. I then add a new layer and select the first colour I want to add, in my case I added a green to go along the "road". After placing the green colour I added noise to the colour and changed the the percentage until I was happy with what it looks like.
I then created another layer and repeated with grey colours to become the mountains and again added noise and changed the levels so they worked well together. After adding all the layers I saw fit, I saved the image as a new jpeg and named it Texture Map.

Adding The Skin
The final step is adding the new skin to the environment. To do that I press M to bring up the material screen, click on displace and click on bitmap. I select my jpeg and drag it onto the environment.