Brief 5: Pushing Boundaries, Student Competitions in Games Art and Design (Case Study Analysis)
I analyzed a 3D challenge hosted on the ever growing ArtStation, with a lot of different categories like character design, environment design, prop design, film art and so on. The one that particularly stood out to me was the category of environment design, something that I am very interested in.
The theme for the challenge was 'Untamed: When Animals Ruled the World', pretty self-explanatory. Under different categories, the participants of the challenge would create a 3D artefact based around the theme.
This is a relatively new challenge dating 2021, and the winner for the category of environment design was Vignesh Gopalakrishnan. For his award winning submission, the artist went with a creative idea of adopting a moon ritual which is a ceremony done to initiate and celebrate the hatching of a pupae using the moonlight of a full moon. The artist has based his work with the theme centering around insect.
He created a lot of rough sketches, drafting out different iterations of the interior where the pupae would be situated and the exterior residences. Interestingly, he collected reference images for houses, weaving patterns and bridges later after he drafted out initial concept arts for the moth village. He created a perfect 2D lit sketch and based his 3D work on the 2D reference where he blocked out, modelled, textured and rendered out the final product.
Figure 1 (2D final sketch of Vignesh Gopalakrishnan, 2021)
Figure 2 (3D final render of Vignesh Gopalakrishnan, 2021)
On an official interview with Rebecca from the Artstation Magazine, he recalled the main reason for joining the challenge due to his friends taking a part in it which gave him the confidence and the motivation to tackle it in the first place. He also recalls how during his research, he chanced upon a theory about how moths use the moon and the stars to orient themselves during navigation and he concluded with his theme basing it around moths and the moon ritual.
However, he did say that staying on the target was very difficult as he had limited time where he could freely work on the challenge and he had to sacrifice countless sleepless nights to get on with it. It does expose the hard work and the dedication that goes behind creating a winning masterpiece art. The advice he gives out to any potential future challengers is to not stress out, don't fawn over other's submissions too much and to give it your all when creating your artwork, no matter the result.
As per the latest data from his ArtStation profile, Vignesh Gopalakrishnan is a Lead 2D Artist over at Ubisoft.
