Daniel Faber - Forlorn

General / 18 January 2022

It is so great to see, how other artists re-imagine and eventually push your own piece forward. And Daniel Faber is one of them. I am so happy and grateful to see his variation of my old Forgotten Library piece. In my opinion, he managed to give it a fresh new mood, please give it a look here! Here is the re-imagined and re-designed one in 3D by Daniel below. How awesome is that!

Just to give you a bit more context, here is the old image I had:


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Frank Herbert's "DUNE - Tribute"

Making Of / 10 January 2019

Building a Dynasty

Do you have an old Game you wanted to give a new look? A new life perhaps? This is my personal entry to global 'Dune' Hall of Fame as an admiration of Frank Herbert's worlds. The "DUNE - Tribute" is a small imaginary project of mine to contribute the to old 'Dune 2 - The Building of a Dynasty' (or "Battle for Arrakis" in console and EU versions) - the first real-time strategy game, published by Westwood in 1992, and further developed by EA. I used to play it years ago. Here you may find the original visuals, re-designed and evolved or how potentially could the re-master of original game look like. Assets modelling performed by Igor Ivanov. He is running the VK community here. All rights belong to their respective owners - "The Herbert Limited Partnership" © and "Electronic Arts" ©. 

Visual development and inspiration

I have been working on several Dune-inspired pieces before and this post is a gathering some other works from ago. I am still wondering if I should continue with this pet-project and what do I expect to have at the end. Perhaps, I am mostly just having fun working on some side things in my spare time. If you have not seen it yet, Main Menu I do imagine as 360 degrees panorama screen.

Older pieces I have been working on

 I kind of like the mix of very old 'DUNE 2' style with 'Dune 2000', so made a few try outs of Atreides Harvester

This is the UI sprite sheet I made to prepare fake game-play screens below:  in-game HUD  , mission Briefing screen and Encyclopedia

VFX and animations

The backgrounds of in-game screens and menu could use some animations, this is how I do imagine this backgrounds to look like:


Thank you very much for watching!

And please let me know your opinions, thoughts, ideas or concerns. I hope, you have enjoyed!


  

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Companions from "BG - Siege of Dragonspear"

Article / 29 October 2018

Hello friends! Below I have got another update regarding my small personal thing I have been working on recently. Together with Baldur's Gate EE Community we worked on concept of enhancing "Baldur's Gate" universe by adding characters from "Siege of Dragonspear" expansion. Below you may find several fan arts and animations that served as a promotion, gathered in original post on Artstation as well.. I hope you enjoy and thank you very much for watching!

Caelar Argent, The Shining Lady:

  

   Neera, the Wild Mage:

Captain Schael Corwin:


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"Lords of Midnight" redesign - Personal visual development experiments

Article / 02 July 2018

"The War of the Solstice has begun. Night has fallen and the foul are abroad."

My humble tribute to one of the first RPG wargame for ZX Spectrum - "Lords of Midnight" and "The Doomdark's Revenge". In memory of its creator - Mike Singleton, who has passed away in 2012, and his successor, Chris Wild. I used to spent hours playing this game back in my childhood, so to me personally it seems to be a good reason to commemorate those series. I called this set 'The Ice Crown Tales'. Gosh, it was one of the first games with the billboard environment design even before the first first person game (Wolfenstein 3D) was released.

What I always was missing in this game were animations. Honestly, this simple 8-bit graphic stimulated my imagination a lot, therefore I could not stand for but to add some here and there:

This is how it looked before despite the fact that those are  up-to-date G.O.G. version screenshots:

I do have fun re-imagining the old games I used to play. I find this a way to bring them to life again. For more information please visit The Official Website

"Arise, Midnight! Arise the Free! Perl and doom lie at our gates. Waken your valor. Arm yourselves with courage! We ride to conquer Doomdark forever! Arise, Midnight, arise!.. "

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Old "DISCIPLES - Sacred Lands" character facial animations

Making Of / 09 March 2018

I dug up one oldie of mine, originally posted here more than a year ago. All started from the effort to redesign the original character avatars from "Disciples - Sacred Lands" of Strategy First, released in 1997. The original beauties were made by amazing artist and illustrator Patrick Lambert, and can be found below.  I ended up trying to add facial animations for those characters. Potentially those animations could have been used to enhance the Lord's look more, or for selected unit within the original game.  I had a lot of fun working on this small restyle and probably get back to it later again. 

The original Lord's avatars within the game are presented here:

The pipeline for all those avatars is quit easy. I used the static image of re-designed Lord, created an animation base in Crazy Talk tool and afterwards edited the whole exported PNG sequence in Photoshop and After Effects.

The original art by Patrick Lambert, made for Strategy First in original "Disciples - Sacred Lands" release:

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"DUNE 2 - The Battle for Arrakis" tribute

Making Of / 06 March 2018

Long live the fighters!

Hello everybody! This is my first blog post here. I wanted to talk a bit about another little personal pet-thing of mine, dedicated to old Westwood's RTS from 1992 "Dune 2 - The Battle for Arrakis" that I used to play in my childhood. There are a lot for old games that I always wanted to see re-mastered and "Dune 2" is one of them. So, I spent some time giving it a new look with additional animations. feeling very inspired, I have started from in-game Arrakis Lore menu, which serves as an encyclopedia. So, here is what I got:

I am still working on this one so perhaps will update it at some point or include other game screens. While doing this I have discovered a bit different approach for visual UI prototyping and display. It includes wide usage of FBX models in video embedded  into Photoshop with further FX sort of work in After Effects.

Hope, you will enjoy and please do not hesitate to let me know your opinions regarding this one. The Windtrap model mesh belongs to Igor Ivanov and was generously offered me for texturing.  Guys are working on fan-made Dune remastering and could use some free hands if any. More information is available here.

The original screens with this Atreides Windtrap Power Station are here:

Will see how it go and perhaps will get back to it at some point later. Thank you very much for watching!

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