Shrine concepts into Maya and back into Photoshop

I wanted to try one more method of work flow before this semester ended. Instead of focusing on a large environment piece I wanted to focus in on one object and create a page of concepts for it before jumping straight into a finished painting.
I started with the page of thumbnail ideas for the shrine keeping them similar in size, colour and perspective so that when asking for feedback on the designs people would be focused on the design and not the other bits that could be changed later on such as colour and the size. People tended to spot the faces in 1 and 3 liking those one more because of it. However 4 was also mentioned by a few people as it had less of a square shape in comparison to the other helping it to stand out more. number 5 was said to be a bit boring and simple in design compared to the others however this gave me an idea of how I could implement these into the game design element of the Shinto project next semester. As the game is all about becoming more in tuned with Kami and Shintoism as the game progresses the nature around the character comes to life more with new colours and spirit creatures. The idea is that the simple designs will be placed towards the start of the game and as the player progresses the designs start to shift until you end up with ones that look like faces, helping to sell the fact the world around you appears more alive and magical.
In the game the shrines would be used as a sort of collectibles. In Shintoism it's not respectful to let shines become dirty and over grown so when the play finds these shrines they can clean them. When doing this enough it will start to effect the world around you as you become closer to the kami.

I decided to take the shrine thumbnail 1 into Maya (I was surprised as well) as I recently started to notice it would be beneficial if I was a little more skilled using this software. It also would provide me a chance to see how blending 2D and 3D would look in my style. It took me a moment to get back into the swing of things in Maya but once I'd refreshed myself on the basic tools the shrine didn't take long at all to model. It helped giving myself something more simplified like this to model and I'll probably be using Maya again for object like this even if I don't use the models in my work as it helped to learn and recap a few things.

When it came to blending the image in with 2D it was easier than expected. I installed Maya mental ray so I had option to take high quality pictures with lighting that I could change to best fit the mood I wanted in the piece. I adjusted it to a lighting so that it was similar to the lighting I had painted in the thumbnail process as this was what I wanted to use in the final painting. I used the 3D model to paint over but before doing so I changed the base colour of the model using the colour match feature then started working over the model giving it that painted style but being careful not to over do it and loose the shape of the 3D image. Clipping layers help me to do this.

Over all it was a fun process of working in 2D and then into 3D. It did take a bit longer to do as there was the extra step of using Maya. Overall I think I could have reached the same outcome if I had just painted the shrine instead of modeling it, however I feel like I learnt more from this process so it wasn't time wasted. I'll be using the early thumbnail way of doing things again for prop design such as this as it helped result in a stronger design and also gave me an idea that could be used in the project. For the little amount of time it takes to do these thumbnails I've found it's really worth the while so far.