Finished Boss Arena

 23/04/21 - Week 29

Now I have worked some more on the boss monster, I have finally finished the Boss Arena.

This was mainly completed by adding the carpet and some blood on the altar as this is included in the boss' design. For the final image I have also added some decoration to the piece, material callouts and some text/annotations for some description, there is a version without the annotation on the level itself included on the PowerPoint.

The successes of this piece are mainly in the overall structure and basic concept, in my opinion. I think there are a lot of successes in the shape of the arena and it has the grandness that I wanted from it - mainly from the scale and the detail in some of the areas. I also really think the piece benefited from the red carpet as it filled a lot of empty space and also a pop of colour that I was initially unaware the piece needed.

The way the arena was constructed was a new method to me but I think the fact that this piece has only few perspective errors means that it instantly makes it look a lot more professional. I will definitely use this method more when creating scenes like this as the process was sped up quite a lot. Though this took me a while as a whole, the rendering process wasn't too slow and I think I was able to add a lot of depth and drama to the scene easily without having to worry about my perspective being off.

The lowest point of this piece is definitely the rendering of the materials, however. Though I have included some material callouts, I struggled lots to full realise the materials that I wanted from the piece, especially the bone. As a whole this piece lacks the inspiration from the initial concept and I would have loved for it to have a better resemblance to the thoughts I was having at the beginning. Even though I like the details I have included in the arena, I think having more obvious bone structure and bone accents would have put the arena up a level as it would be much more unique, boss-level light and nuanced. Noticing the fact that the arena as a whole was not looking as I initially wanted I essentially gave up at one point in trying to properly render the bone how I wanted it to, this was definitely a mistake and if I were to go back and redo this piece I would probably change a lot of the interior design and try to make my substance designer materials more accurate to the plan.

There was a lot of time in this project where I was thinking about starting over to get the initial idea back, but in the end I am somewhat glad I didn't. I think the idea is definitely different and perhaps not as successful as it could have been in comparison, but I still think this piece has some good aspects to it and most importantly has drama and looking at it now, I think it does have the eligibility to be a boss level.

Overall, there is a lot of positives and negatives in this piece but I think I am overall proud of it unlike some other projects I have completed during my time on the course.