Video Game Superstar Challenge - Wonder Boy III  

Hi guys,

it's the first time for me to participate in a contest from Hum3d, and when I saw the topic I couldn't wish for anything better.

I'm planning to make a scene from the SEGA Master System game Wonder Boy III - The Dragon's Trap. It's a game I discovered on the Game Gear when I was a kid, lots of memories come with it, and i'm looking forward to tackle the challenge of transcripting it in 3D.

The scene I chose from the game is pretty much around the beginning of the game, when our hero (cursed and transformed into Lizard Man) have to go through a desert:

The game recently got a remake, updating the graphics, transforming dull backgrounds into beautiful scenery, and from which I'll get my inspiration too:

Original & Remake:

The desert level in the remake:

The idea is that I'd like to have a scene with lots of energy, where we'd see the hero breathing fire in the air like Lizard Man does in the game, surrounded by ennemies, a scene including all the different types of enemies of the environment, with pyramids and cactus in the background.

Now for the look, the elements of the scene are gonna be in a plastic-like material, with the sand being rather realistic, trying to replicate what could be a photoshoot with small scale figures.

At the moment I don't have any draft of the final composition, but I decided to start modelling one of the enemies and to do a bit of look dev on it before going deeper in the elaboration  of the scene. I decided to start with the flower-like enemy:

Official Art of 1989:

My take on the monster:

There's still a lot of polishing to do with the sand texture, but this is the type of material the project will keep for the character and monsters.

Now I'll try to work on the composition to give a better idea of the entire scene, see you next time!

Ok so here is my first attempt at the composition of the scene, really simplistic 3D shapes to represent the different elements (with the big blob in the middle being the main character):

I'm not happy with it yet, so let's see how it will look with more time and polishing.

I also modeled another enemy today, the cloud:

Remake sprite:

My 3D version:

See you next time!

Hi Jonathan, glad to see you on the competition. Great start, looking forward to see updates. Good luck!

To take a bit of distance from the composition work (to have the time to think of something better than the version I showed), I decided to start modeling the main character, Lizard Man:

Official art from 1989:

Remake:

My version:

Still need a lot of work, so see you next time!

Here it is, after a bit of time on other projects, I'm done with modeling the lizard man:

Now I still need to rig quickly the mouth to get it open, model a tongue and then I'll pose the character as soon as I get closer to a satisfying composition.

See you next time!

Hey everyone, it's been a while!

After days struggling to get a good composition for my scene, I decided to check some Nintendo official arts and fan arts, and get inspiration from them.

I stumbled upon this picture of a Warioland fan art which I though had all the energy I want in my scene:

I discovered it's a fan art made by this guy: http://imson.deviantart.com/art/Waaahaha-337416856

It's full of energy, so I decided to use that picture as a reference, and place my elements following its lines of action, etc.

I posed my lizard man mesh in Zbrush using the Tpose plugin, placed the enemies and posed them to be a bit more dynamic. I then followed with the environment and created a pyramid, a palm tree and a small cactus, to finally come up with this:

As you can see, I also placed my elements following the composition rules (diagonals, 1/3, golden ratio, etc.) and I think I got the amount of energy I wanted out of the scene.

So now I had to take care of the lighting and secondary elements, like the clouds. I used Turbulence FD for these, and rendered them to later add them in compositing.As for the lighting, I wanted to have a strong distant light acting as the sun, with big broad colored soft shadows to complement the sand and global environment.

I decided to have a purple sky just like in the original game, but with a clearer color on the horizon, and a bit of a warmer tone:

Now I'm currently putting everything together and compositing, so see you soon for the final upload and entry of my participation!