Major Project: Limbo Environment Development

I want to really show off Limbo with bright lights, glows, and neon signs to really enhance the Vegas feel. After looking at the Neon Boneyard in Vegas and popular Vegas bars and clubs I decided to make my environment out of the stylized and iconic lettering. 

In illustrator I traced the lettering of these signs that have all kinds of fonts and styles. I was also informed that you can import these vectors from Illustrator straight into Maya to make a beveled model. Using this technique i built my environment out of the lettering, dice, chips and cards. I then used my model as a guide to create a quick painted sketch and different thumbnails for my colour palette.

Traced lettering in Illustrator.

Model Screenshots

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Thumbnails for colour palette.

Using Death's silhouette to show the scale of the world.

Minor Project: Limbo Thumbnails

Minor Project: Jerry Colour Palette

Minor Project: Jerry Thumbnails

There is not a lot you can do with a Janitor's clothes but these are some variations of Jerry's clothing.

Minor Project: Death's Cards

I want Death to have a set of his own unique playing cards that he flashes in his hands and are also up scaled in the environment. I decided that his for expressions would be a good idea for the suits of his deck. The rest of the deck will be the same as below just with multiple masks in correspondence with the number.

Minor Project: Death Character Poses

I decided to do some character poses for Death that would really show off his showmanship character. I wish to use the most dynamic pose for Death's concept art.

Minor Project: Limbo Thumbnails

Limbo is just an empty space, there are no walls, ceiling or even any floor. However there is Death's very own Casino where you can gamble to win your life back. 

Being that there is no walls etc, it is difficult to design such a space but this is the kind of thing I'm looking for. Colour is a key element for my environment so I tried to avoid black as much as possible in these initial thumbnails.

Front entrance of Casino

Inside the Casino

Minor Project: Jerry Thumbnails

I do not want Jerry's design to change much since the original concept art in year 1. I want to keep the body design but change the face a little so I just did different versions of it.

Minor Project: Death Colour Palette

After deciding on Death's design I began looking at colour palettes for him. My Death is a very unconventional version of Death so I figured having bright colours rather than black was a good starting point to really make him pop and have that "showmanship" i need.

Minor Project: Death Prop Thumbnails

Instead of having a scythe, Death will have a cane which he uses to point in a direction. Keeping the theme of the casino I designed head pieces influenced mainly by dice, poker chips and skulls. I also thought about the body of the cane and designed some rough shapes. 

Note: At a point in the animation the cane produces a sharp blade like a scythe.

Minor Project: More Death Thumbnails

After my tutorial I looked at my first set of thumbnails and took my two favourite masks and suits and expanded on them to create different versions. (Again the scythe is a temporary prop). 

I really like the idea of death having a neutral face or just a stuck expression and I expanded on this concept.

From above I thought about Death maybe being able to show different emotions in the animation. I came to the idea of designing a couple more key expression masks and combining them together to rotate as shown below.

Minor Project: Death Thumbnails

The scythe is a temporary prop at the moment.

Adaptation B: Library Thumbnails

In my tutorial I was told that drawing isn't getting me anywhere and instead was told to use photographs of the objects I would like in my environment and edit them using the tools and filters available to me in Photoshop to create an engaging, detailed concept. Still using a limited colour palette, here are the thumbnails I created using this method. The first image is the concept with the photographs original colours.

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