Behind The Scenes: Godzilla vs. Kong (Patreon)

This is always safe option if you're looking to create something new and your struggling with inspiration. Just pick some favorite movie, game or TV show and try to recreate your favorite scene. It's great practice that can take you out of your comfort zone in terms of creative techniques.

I had to decide on two main things. What scene I want to create and what techniques to use. I picked the Godzilla and Kong fight scene in the city, because why make things easy, if I can try to model two new characters at the same time right? :)

Then I defaulted to the "low poly" flat shaded look, that I was using a lot when creating scenes from movies like Star Wars or Avengers. I did this mostly to save time on mapping and texturing and bring the fidelity a bit down, because there was no way I could create detailed textured scene like this in a day.

Visit the full Pinboard here

Creating constraints like this make everything a bit easier and most of all, allow you to focus on a final result much more. I went and gathered what I could on a Pinboard to get a good glimpse of how Godzilla and Kong actually look and what to expect in terms of modeling. 

So you can find a lot of sketches, character shots and even topology reference. All to help me to get the low poly character model quicker. I then included some mood shots with lit cityscape and several action poses for later reference.

I gave a sketch a bit more attention this time because there was one thing I was mindful from the start, and that's to get dense city design with two main characters working together in a single layout. It looked fine on sketch but the warning lights were on. Even in black and white, it already look a bit cluttered, so I had to get extra careful on final composition and lighting.

After modeling and rigging the base characters, I created a city layout and tried to create the composition. As I expected, I had to reduce the building density, but after adding all the neons and  creating a night lighting scheme, the scene was still to dense and unreadable.

I have to say, this one was quite hard to get done on time. I had to make some compromises and used a lot of ready-made OpenVDB smoke objects to mask imperfections. Even then, I will probably give the lighting one more go eventually, because I feel there is a lot of lost potential in the scene. But that is something I recommend to do every time. Just reset the lighting and go again to get something else. The reason why I sometimes rush things is to get it out on time for you to watch :)

You can watch the process video on Youtube 

So that's it for the latest illustration and I hope it will help you with your own work.

See you in the next one! :)