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!

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:

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!