Behind The Scenes: Mortal Kombat (Patreon)

While I didn't like the new movie as much as I wanted, I appreciate the attempt to revive Mortal Kombat in the world of cinema and it brought a lot of warm memories of the old movie, but especially the games. I can remember mashing the keyboard buttons with my brother and taking advantage of locking out the keyboard with certain button combination :) That often turned into a real Mortal Kombat.

That's why I decided to remake one of the oldest scenes, the Shao Kahn's Courtyard arena from the original MK game. And who else should stand against each other, than eternal enemies Scorpion and Sub-Zero. Ok, the real reason is, that it's enough to model one ninja and then just change the color, just like they did in the original :D

Visit the full Pinboard here

The references were sparse, so I had to dig a bit deeper to find this particular arena in the later games as well. Then I just focused on some particular details, like the roof and dragon statues, and tried to find more references to similar objects in the real world, that would offer me more insight and details.

Luckily, I was able to identify the the chinese origin of the roof and gather up few golden dragons. When searching for characters, I was focusing on older designs, where they were really differentiated only by color (up to Mortal Kombat 2 I think).

The sketch was quite simple, the only thing I had to solve is how to split the arena, so that enough space is left for characters and the surroundings. And I had to reduce the whole arena quite a lot of course, to fit the square diorama and offer enough level of detail at the same time.

Blender Tips

When it comes to ideas from movies and games, there is often only little creative work behind a tribute like this and I want to bring you more value, so I will list some Blender tips, that helped me to accelerate the creation process.

Blockout
The best thing to start with, even if you have a sketch at hand. By simply placing cubes and planes around, you can quickly make changes to composition and layout and get better glimpse at final result and whether these proportions will work.

Snapping
When creating roof, often I just create underlying geometry and then snap the shingles in place. I just switch the snapping to faces, enable rotation in snap options and then by holding CTRL after G, you can snap your object on surfaces in no time without actually turning on the snapping.

Skin Modifier
One of my favorite modifiers of all time. Not only you can use it to create thin structures like frames and railings, but you can scale the vertices one by one with CTRL + A and create all kinds of shapes or animals. For example, the whole dragon statue is made out of few vertices and skin modifier, saving a ton of time on modling.

Rigify
This addon is available by default in Blender, you can just activate it in preferences. Right after that, you can find the human metarig option in SHIFT + A menu and convert it to fully rigged armature with click of a button (in the armature tab, rigify section). It has all the basics you need including inverse kinematics.

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! :)