Anyway, now that I’m done complaining about my first-world problems, here are another couple of concepts I made for my favourite quest so far, One Piercing Note.
They are both for the clock tower. It was quite a challenge, the combination between quest requirements and engine limitations made the whole thing a mine field of issues to address.
Also, the drawing distance didn’t allow too high a tower, increasing the risk of something closer to a can of tuna rather than a graceful structure striving to touch the sky.

In the end I think we did a good job, so if you haven’t played the quest yet, do it now!

This is one of the concepts I made for the bell tower of the monastery featured in One Piercing Note.

I built it in Sketchup first, there were A LOT of technical issues to address beforehand and it saved me a lot of time.

They work slightly differently from other workshops, in that there’s a monthly assignment, people post their work in progress, and Richard posts his comments and suggestions along the way.
Attendees can express their approval on fellow artists via the usual Like button forums often have.
The one with the highest number of Likes at the end of the month wins, a part from the mere enjoyment of peer’s approval, one of Richard’s paintings.
For the workshop he also paints his own version of the assignment and posts the video of the process at the end of the month. Which is great, because you see which choices a master would take in the same thing you tried to do.

The community is quite nice as well, there are some skilled artists there and they’re all really nice and helpful.
More often than not, other people’s eyes are better than yours, especially if you’ve been staring at the same things for a few hours.

Anyway, I had the time to work only of two of the four workshops so far, because it always clashed with some of my freelance deadlines (gosh I can’t wait to be allowed to post THOSE things!)
I was pretty happy with the first one, now looking back at it I realize it’s pretty weak.
Maybe I’m getting better already?

This is another one of the environments I made for Runescape.
The quest it was made for is One Piercing Note, maybe the project I’ve had more fun working on.
There were many requirements we had to comply with in terms of gameplay. There’s something happening at some point, and I had to design the building to make this main event as interesting as possible AND at the same time overcoming some pretty tough engine limitations.
For this reason I had to model the entire environment on Google Sketchup first, and try and address all the possible issues together with the modelling team before they happened.
I’m really happy with the result, the monastery is one of the best looking places in the game so far (the next releases are going to be even better!), not to mention the fact that the content is top quality, a really fun quest to play, with a unique feel and a wonderful soundtrack.

As if all this weren’t enough, the lore this quest is built on – The Song Before The War – is a great read, check it out on the author’s blog, which links directly to its page on Runescape’s website.