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By: Kingston Chan

Project Overview

Hi everyone, I am Kingston, I would like to share with you a project overview of a competition (Dominance War SDK) I had participated in. I created this image for this competition with a War General Theme. The rules of this competition is you only have nine days to finish the piece. This article will focus more on how I work on the pre-production part of this contest.

The rules are simple, you are given a pre-made unwrapped models and finalize it with details. The topic is the war general.

Your war general portrait can be from any time period and of any race. As long as he/she/it looks like a war general and has the appropriate team war logo somewhere on the body/clothes, everything is good!

By joining big international CG forums and participating in competitions, it is a good way of seeing how fast and good works are done by others. Comparing, sharing and learning from international designers/ artists, and you can share and experience each other 's working process, their pipelines and it is also a chance to network. As for students, it is good to keep comparing your work and aiming to achieve what you see in the industry. Always see yourself as a professional designer/ artist, and avoid staying in your comfort zone. As a result, you will see yourself improving much faster than others.

Ia. Design Doc & Research Board

Always do a first level research to nail down your main Theme, in this case (Red Indian), i have made this research board to study how a real Red Indian looks like. Try to understand the questions of what makes someone visually looks like a Red Indian. Will it be the (color?, patterns? Costume? Ranks? Silhouette?...etc)

Ib. Others Research Board

After you have the MAIN THEME, research and categorize the images to help or inspire you in different stages of the development. Make sure you collect a lots of references, filter them and categorize them in different groups in your research board. Then you can focus by using these few boards in 70% to 80% of you whole project. Pull out other references as needed in some special cases. This will be more productive, I saw many students researching through the whole project, and getting distracted by other stuffs in the middle of the project during this time. Manage everything you need at the start, it will help you to focus.

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