Class:
PIE 1 Art- Concept Art

Assignment:
Choose two environments from the Mario, Metroid, and/or Zelda universes and use Maya to recreate and model them in 3D. You are encouraged to choose environments from one of the series’ 2D games, but you may choose a 3D environment if you’d like. This is a rough draft model. Get all of the essential shapes there, and don’t worry about textures. When you’re done modeling, apply a three-toned toon shader and outlines to the model.

The purpose of this assignment and the next two is to take one of these two environments, model a 3D base in Maya, then use Photoshop to paint over the shaded render and make a “painterly” style recreation of the environment.

Description:
This was the first step to another three stage project. As described above, this first assignment had us pick two environments from the Mario, Metroid, and/or Zelda universes and model them in 3D. Fortunately, our teacher allowed us to use the Metroid environments from our modeling class for this assignment as well if we liked (which all of us did :P).

I chose to model the Dark World Pyramid from A Link to the Past and reuse my Recharge Station from Metroid Fusion. I did touch up the Recharge Station a little, but the majority of the work was done on the Pyramid. Like I did with the Recharge Station, I modeled the Pyramid by basing one unit in Maya off of one pixel in the screenshot. Because there is some 2D perspective going on in the screenshot, I was worried that things wouldn’t quite fit or that I’d mess up by a unit or two, but fortunately, things fit together surprisingly well!

I took the renders from Maya and arranged them on a page in Photoshop. Finally, we printed these out (the last image below) and hung them up. Then we picked our one favorite redesign from each person’s work. The votes were tallied up, and whichever redesign got the most votes was the one we were to work on in the next assignment (in the case of a tie, the artist chose which one he/she wanted to work on). Which one do you like the best? 🙂

The images for the Recharge Station are the same ones from my “PIE 1 Art, Modeling: 3a – Modular Metroid Environment Model” album.

The “revisions” mentioned in the image descriptions refer to the numbered save files I have for each model. For example, I have five different files for the Pyramid, each being more complete than the last, with the fifth being the final model that I used for the final printed image.

Pyramid Tris: 95,532 (without outlines), 1,083,142 (with outlines)
Recharge Station Tris: 11,096 (without outlines), 1,840,636 (with outlines)