My group were allocated the altar room. We decided as a group to go with Egyptian theme as we believed it had the most potential for not only an environment, but also for our hero assets.
We discussed what the story and lore behind our scene should be and we wanted to do something less conventional with the Egypt theme. Therefore, we picked a less widely known God in Khonsu – God of the Moon..
I began by creating a mood board of potential ideas for hero assets related to Egypt and Khonsu. Khonsu’s staff in particular interested me. It had the classic Egyptian colours of blue and gold, which would be interesting to work with in substance painter when painting the asset.
The first idea I came up with was a statue of Khonsu holding his staff. At the top of the staff is a candle, which not only acts as a source of light in the altar room, but also as a object of worship. When researching I found that candles are very common in altar rooms.
The next idea I had was similarly a statue, however this time it was a bust. The light source would come from the orb on his head, which represents the moon. It would be a clear glass orb with a light source radiating out of it. My group agreed on having the environment be set at night (as he is the God of the Moon) and so this would really stand out in the environment.
I then expanded on this idea after, in our group, we discussed potentially adding a cult type aspect to our environment in which people would be sacrificed for Khonsu. Therefore, I thought a hidden knife in the statue would be a nice element to experiment around with. I decided that the best place for a hidden knife would be Khonsu’s beard, where it is the handle and when pulled out it reveals a knife.
Another idea I had was to keep the knife, but make Khonsu the handle. This is my least favourite idea as I believe it would be hard to make it stand out as a hero object in a large environment, however it does still follow the Egyptian and Khonsu theme fairly well.
A large issue with a lot of these designs is if they are even feasible in terms of creating them in Maya. For example, the statues of Khonsu would be much more suitable to make in Mudbox where I could sculpt the facial features. I will need to refine my designs in a later post, taking into consideration what is possible, at my current skill level, in Maya.
Nonetheless, this was a good start and helped me understand the theme much more.