Charactir
Art archive

Game art

A cannibal camp built inside a plundered royal grave, modelled as a game environment and lit twice.

An isometric 3D diorama on black. A rectangular plot of packed earth and grass is enclosed by low walls of pale grey stone with carved swirls, with a wooden stake fence beyond them. Inside stand an orange hide tent, a stone sarcophagus with its heavy carved lid slid aside, a second open tomb, a lit campfire in a ring of stones, a candle-covered plinth stacked with skulls and bones, and a skull mask mounted on a red painted board.

In the long-forgotten landscapes of a civilisation now past, a tribal society forms in the concave of its ruins. Cannibals set up camp in a well-fortified position, unaware of the long history the place holds. Newly built portions frame the once-royal grave, long since plundered, scattered with the remains of a freshly fought skirmish and the bones of defeated foes.

The set is game art rather than illustration, which changes what it is for: every object in it is a prop that has to hold up from any angle and at any distance, so the walls, the tent, the tomb, the fence, the plinth and the fire are separate assets that happen to have been arranged into a scene. The carved swirls in the stone are the giveaway: that is a tiling texture doing the work of a civilisation.

The two lighting states are the point of the pair. With ambient light the enclosure reads as architecture; with it removed, only the things that carry a flame still exist, and the camp turns out to be much smaller than the ruin it is sitting inside.

Three posts, one piece. The old site published this three times (posts 383, 387 and 389) with the same body text and the same two images on each. They are one set, and they are one set here. The close-up renders were never published at all, and the folder skips from close-up-02 to close-up-04; there is no third close-up anywhere in the archive.

The same diorama from the same camera, lit only by its own fires. The campfire, the candles on the bone plinth and a dozen small torches along the fence are the only light sources, and the stone walls fall away into near black beyond their reach.
The same scene and the same camera, with the ambient light removed. Only the props that carry a flame still exist.
A close view of the open sarcophagus. Its carved lid, showing a horned skull in relief, lies propped at an angle beside the empty stone box, with bones and rubble scattered around it and a burning torch on a tripod behind.
The lid is off and the grave is empty. Everything in the enclosure is here because that already happened.
A close view of the camp. The orange hide tent fills the left, spears driven into the ground beside it. Behind, a horned skull mask hangs on a red board over a fur, and to the right a stone plinth is covered in melted candles and a skull. The campfire burns at the bottom of the frame.
The tent, the shrine and the fire, which is the whole of the settlement.
A close view of the gateway. A stone arch built from pale carved blocks frames a red-painted panel carrying a large bone-white skull emblem, with thorny vines growing over the stone and four torches on wooden tripods lighting the ground in front of it.
The gate. The skull emblem is painted on rather than carved, so it postdates the wall it hangs on.