Godric Rides through the countryside marvelling at the natural wonders God has provided the rightous! -- The purpose of these early shots was to show the bounty and beauty of the world the characters live in, so that later when it all "goes to hell" we can really visually feel what they have lost. An images like this can also start conversations about the color script, perhaps saving the golden yellows for God and the muted blues for the Devil.

The biggest advantage of a 3D based workflow is that lighting is fast and easy to change. In this example we quickly tried a variety of lighting scenarious to vet which ones would best suit the story moment.

At OPB our Concept Art strives to serve a story purpose. As fun as it would be to do another epic "lava concept" we brainstormed with the writers to try to find not only an environment but a MOMENT that would be dramatic. We settled on a rescue, and as dangerous as this type of rescue would be, we imagined perhaps she could have survived on a stone well until her rescuers used VERY carefully placed boards to save her.

The poses of this and the prior image seem obvious, but it took many iterations focused on JUST the posing necessary to really tell the story of what is going . The handing off of boards from one solider to the next needed to clearly read and so great care was taken to use the elements in the environment to silhouette the action... Without LOOKING like we're silhouetting the action.

Another huge advantage of our 3D based process. It was relatively quick to do this close up shot in the same environment since we had most of the assets already built in 3D.

Millions of refugees leave their charred lands and migrate across the continent to the surviving cities.

A second more "cinematic" shot of the people escaping land devastated by the volcanoes. The word cinematic is an ambiguously defined to mean "generally good" but what is specifically means to US is that we are SACRIFICING elements that could look visually interesting, to make a more simple more "dumb" (in a way) composition. The previous shot above is arguably a more interesting but choosing to give up some layers of depth in favor of a focus on the 3 simple elements the shot needs to tell the story, grass, people and lava, makes the second shot more impactful and therefore more "cinematic." This is why talking to Directors about the STORY of every shot allows us to make informed compositional choices that cut what might be "cool" in favor of narrative clarity

One of the NEW services we offer. Helping clients create what we call a VISUAL SLICE of their game or film. Instead of providing just a piece of concept art we provide a playable UNREAL 5 SCENE! -- of your project.

It's forboding to see a disaster from far away which is analagous to how most of us see disasters in our daily lives. On TV from a distance. We thought this shot would be a nice way to invite the viewer to understand the chaos afar first. That it would contrast nicely later when we get into the thick of it. We show that this is not just happening to our protagonists but to the WORLD.

This was one of the original concepts that spawned the whole IP. The idea that the leader of this army was reviled to the point of being murdured by one of the soldiers.

The first big reveal of our bad guy. I guess you could call Satan incarnate... a bad guy? The goal here was to FEEL THE SCALE and there are 2 tricks to that that aren't so obvious. One is to make sure there is a clearly readable ground plane that goes BACK into the shot. Ideally with a scale cue like a person so that when you see the CLOSE person and the FAR person you get that the far person is far. The second is the "GREEBLES" a made up word that means little bits of detail. For an image like this it's critically important to look at real volcanos and make sure the smoke greebles are the right SIZE to match their distance and size. It's such a simple thing to pay attention to but is so often overlooked.

A huge advantage of concepting in 3D is that color and feel is easy to iterate one. Considering that this was the arrival of Satan we played a few more dark options, but since we're going for a very grounded IP, and that so much of it would be moody and overcast, we decided this shot could stay bit more sunny to contrast the drab that will come later.

What often ruins a piece of Concept Art is the urge to put TOO MUCH in the shot. The huge advantage of 3D based concepting is that that once you have a base shot it only take a BIT longer to do alternate shots to help tell your story. The previous shot was about the reveal with SOME hint of the devil, but this is the shot where we really see him. But even then not too much! For the main scary baddie it's always more impactful to just show a little bit of leg first instead of the full monty. This shot is purposely cropped give us a substantial TASTE of what's to come without ruining the mystery.

Francis runs for his life in the insane chaos. We tried to capture a frame that had the protagonist as a focal point but still told the story of everything chaos unfolding around him.

We iterated a LOT on this concept and similar to the discussion of GREEBLES above, water splashes like this are very dependant on the SCALE of the water matching the SIZE of the intended explosion. From watching reference videos we noticed that at this distance water splashes don't really look like water anymore but rather large volumetric froth shapes. Notice the less attended splash in the image above to see the difference. We also took great pains to show a proper GROUND PLANE that leads your eye into the frame and with splashes and people at various distances as scale cues.

An overhead shot like this removes perspective ON PURPOSE. The goal here is to force the viewer to focus on only one thing. The radius of the damage and and destruction.

A moment of aftermath. The goal here was to show Francis surrounded by the horror of what has just happened and although it seems incidental, the man walking by him and consoling him by placing a hand on his shoulder requires VERY specific posing. Subtle narratives only seem obvious after they are accomplished but they are always a lot of work to make them read just right. And narratively someone who is "alone" is different from someone in "shock" so in order to feel the "shock" we needed another chraracter behaving in a way that contrasts Francis.

Once again the power of 3D concepting is that you can get ALTERNATE shots without much cost in time. This was an important zoom-in shot to show Francis's eyes what he's going through. It's also not particularly difficult for our artists to make the character look like an actor. In this case we imagined for the part of Francis being played by Riz Ahmed.

One of the first time we see the Devil in a moment of quiet, but we still want most of his body to be a mystery. It's always nice to NOT see the body of a monster and save the big reveal for the END. Once you see something fully it automatically becomes less scary because it's less mysterious. As is evidenced by the amazing reveal of the T-Rex in the first Jurassic Park.

After the battle we wanted a shot to re-clarify the stakes and who is at war, Man and Satan. Early on the idea came to us that it would creepy and amazing if the Devil was literally made up of the damned. A lone priest coming up to and unspeakably large pilar of a leg seemed very dramatic to us.

NOW the full scope of the horror comes into focus. Hell lives ON the Devil's body. Hundred's of thousands people living in enternal agony and a brave lone priest doing God's work.

In a GAME version of this IP you definitely need some DAMNED to fight. In our IP development video 4 on the process page we discuss this in a bit more detail but the jist is that movies / shows and games all have different needs. In this case we tried hard to push the "zombies" in a different direction and thought of a few things. 1. that the damned are merged with people they have wronged in some way as eternal torture. 2. that their always SAD, desperate and pleading for help, but never "grrrr I'm gonna getcha" A surprisingly difficult thing to get across in a single image.

One of the pilars of our potential "zombiesque" baddie is that the damned are of course burned from an eternity in hell but they could not be so charred and black because then they veered into monster territory and the original idea is that these were SUFFERING PEOPLE. the literal DAMNED. -- This meant that in the design they had to resemble the people in their former lives. Perhaps it's not so believable that they would still have their clothes on in hell, but without their clothes on they would not read as former humans, especially in a game where you can't control the camera or how they are seen cinematically. BUT AGAIN in IP development these are the kinds of tricky back and forth decisions we can help you make.

And every video game needs BOSSES! - So depending on the IP it might be necessary to gloop the damned into glurps and figure out how this mass of suffering is going to defeated.

Godric ready for the fight. We imagined this character to be Jason Momoa and so tried to get a likeness in the concept art and this was one of the FEW images that rocked out the gate and got almost no revisions.

The goal here is to finally fulfill the promise of horror that's been built up. The basic idea for a "spiderish" design was arrived at relatively quickly but trying to depict it in a way that would really SHOW ITS SCALE was extremely difficult. One might assume something like this started with lots of design drawings but in a task like this 99% of what matters is SHAPE, and SCALE. So any drawing done without context of the scale is in danger of ADDING fussy and unecessary extras to make it more "interesting." Advances in 3D based concept art let us relatively quickly GET said scale and mood which allows us to vet the design in its FULL CONTEXT so that we don't need to give him a glowing RED EYE or some other over the top thing to make him cool. Just a dim devil's vagina / butthole that makes you go BLIND when you look at it! Now THAT is scary. -- In end we also needed the flaming arrows to push the scale. Interestingly something that isn't even part of the core design ends up mattering a lot. Art is HARD!:)

Post Gamo I think the worlds gross-tolerance went up. And here we attempt to nudge it a bit farther. Gore for gore's sake has no place but for a few seconds seeing the physcial horrors of what's going is important to understand the stakes of the story.

Iterating on this is a great example of how tuning an IP can completely depend on the story and tone. ONE off tone thing can make the entire story or game jump the shark. In this case our original brief was to have SOME visual effect of people going blind do to gazing into the Devil's open... facehole? -- But this was a much later version that was trying more and more to keep it subtle and natural leaning much more to a skin disease than to something supernatural.

Here were the other options which are both valid depending on the tone of the IP. Something else that needs to be considered is that what looks a good in a still image gets WAY more over the top when animated. For this IP dealing with a REAL LIFE supernatural element we opted for the above classier DEVIL BLINDNESS.