These assignments consisted of projects we had to do in our last year. We a set of 4 topics that we had to design in a certain time period and environmental setting. My time period was the Classic Roman/Greek era. My building was a city gate. the vehicle that I had to design was a cargo ship. My prop set were weapons and my  environment was Tundra.

Once our topics were given we had to do research and gather reference material.

cargo ship (Charon's ferry) overpaint

cargo ship renders

While I was researching my era and  the type of vehicle that was common to the era I noticed a lot of ancient Greek Triremes and Octaremes. These ships were mainly used for war and commerce in the Ancient Greek world. most of my designs were very simple and plain but then I researched more of the Mythological side of the Greek world. I stumbled on the legend of Charon the soul ferryman. Charon ferries the souls across the the river Styx to the Underworld. So I came up with the story that when a great battle was fought and many men died the ferryman would need a huge ship to escort them across the river Styx. And his ship would be astounding yet terrifying.

quick simple sketches for the cargo ship. As you can see the ship design is way to boring for it to be an interesting vehicle.

environment and building renders.

Environment and building overpaint. 

As you can see based off of my designs I decided to make the city gate the gates of two of the realms of the Underworld. One is the gate to Elysium and one is the gate to Tartaros. Elysium is where the good souls go and Tartaros is where the damned souls go. further explored on the Mythological side of my given era. As you can see these gates are the opposite of one another one is clearly beautiful and well preserved and one is broken, terrifying and neglected.

I decided to do my environment and my building together because it was a perfect opportunity to show the state of the environment. Both are based off of a tundra one is a subtropical tundra (hills and vast grass lands) and one is a temperate tundra (dry, lifeless and almost no vegitation). 

environment variations.

Depth pass and final render.

overpaint.

architecture variation and silhouettes.

the 3rd sketch is the beginning of the mirrored gates.

propset (weapons of the gods) render.

Again delving further into the Greek mythology I decided to make the weapons of the great Triad of God. The brothers Zeus, Hades and Poseidon all wielded devine weapons crafted by the god Hephaestus. Zeus wielded a lightning bolt, Hades a pitchfork (bident) and Poseidon a trident. I made different variations of these weapons and chose the most interesting. The given number of required props was 5 but I wanted to show the spear of Triam the weapons merged together to defeat their father Kronos.

sketches and silhouettes of the weapons.

I made a lot of variations of each weapon but one proved a very difficult design. Starting from left to right. 

The lightning bolt of Zeus was a mighty weapon but the Bident and trident were both already spears. I wanted to give Zeus a sword. when I did my research on the prop design and weapons from that particular time period, I saw there was a sword also used by Leonidas in the movie 300. A Kopis sword is what it was called. It was a one-handed sword with a curved blade. It immediately spoke to me  and thought it resembled a lightning bolt perfect for the design. 

The Pitchfork for Hades was fun to design simple yet challenging. It needed to be Gritty, scary and fierce. Hades is the god of the Underworld and I wanted to convey that topic in the design.

The Trident of Poseidon was very difficult. We have all seen so many variations of this weapon in modern day media so I wanted to do something new and refreshing yet interesting to look at. As I was designing this weapon it stood out to one of my teachers that I forgot to look at one key detail; the sea. Poseidon is god of the sea so that is important for the design. While I was sketching some oceanic wildlife I drew a squid from memory. After I drew this creature from memory I looked up actual reference and noticed something strange. Two arms were longer the rest of it's legs and started to sketch out some ideas. I showed it to my teacher and he was excited for this particular design.

wireframes environment-building, vehicle and propset.