1St Post, Collapsed Bridge

Hi my name is Vladimir Holopov, some might have seen me on forums under the alias 3DVlad, welcome to my 3D art blog. Here I will be posting my works in progress and walking throught the process of creation of my assets.  This time I will be making a collapsed bridge set in the post apocalyptic sci-fi era. I like this combo because the science fiction genre gives some freedom to invent, while maintaining realistic believability, and with post-apocalyptic genre there is the ability to create interesting textures that show the effect of time and weather on the object. The idea of the collapsed bridge is going to let me practice creating concrete and how it would brake and shatter the pavement.

My initial inspiration for this was a concept art by Sparth, a great concept artist whose work I admire. He has done a lot of concepts for Rage, one of my favorite games from the art point of view.

 

The part that gave me the idea initially is the collapsing pieces that frame the image in the foreground. However that alone is not enough. Another inspiration for me is Kevin Johnstone's artwork.

 

Kevin is a lead environment artist on the Gears of War series, and this is the kind of setting that I am going for. Also I think it's a good choice because I work with UDK engine, same engine used for gears, and I can take apart their sharers to see how they are made, as well as look at their textures closer. So I started out with some simple brainstorm sketching session in Photoshop and here is what I have. I explored some silhouette studies for the bridge support as that is going to be the center piece that creates most of the visual interest. Once I liked some of the silhouettes I explored them a little further by giving them some shape from shading. I estimate it will take me about a week to complete this project. I want to take 2-3 days to create a nice highpoly model, I haven't done much broken concrete and pavement so it might give me problems, and about 2 days to create some nice textures for it.  

Here is a 3D Blockout of the bridge, I have made some changes in order to make it a bit more modular. The breakdown by colors is the assets that will be reused in order to save time, and maintain some consistency in the design.