Oh hello, ArtStationeers!
If this is your first encounter with our work on Project Dragon, you might want to head over to this article first and then come back since our concept work will provide some context for the 3D work.
Project Dragon was a multiplayer sandbox action-adventure that was in the making at Phoenix Labs. Picture something like Minecraft meets Breath of the Wild sprinkled with some elements from games like Stardew Valley, set in a universe not based on any existing IP. We got to contribute a lot of concepts, 3D environment assets, props, and 3D characters work over the course of 3 years. Sadly, the game was canceled a short while ago.
While it breaks our hearts that you will never get to see Dragon (a codename, obviously) in its fully realized form, we're grateful that we are allowed to show the art we contributed, providing a glimpse at this wonderful and whimsical world that we loved to work on alongside a terrific team at Phoenix Labs that we loved to work with.
At the center of today's big portfolio push: the 3D work we did on props and other environment assets!
We joined the project in its early stages. At that point, there was no 3D Env Lead in Phoenix Labs' Dragon team, so our 3D artists went into vis-dev and R&D mode right away. One of our first missions was to build an early test location and explore the potential look of materials like wood, rock and soil while also checking potential approaches for grass and trees.
This was followed by a first beautiful corner to assess how well some of the early design ideas would translate. The results would help inform the world generation system to come.
(Concept provided by Phoenix Labs)
And then? Well, things just kept going, the pipeline was defined and refined, Project Dragon eventually transitioned into production mode, the teams on both sides slowly expanded, and we ended up doing a ton of environment assets and materials, a good number of which you can find in our ArtStation gallery now.
Our hats shall be tipped to the wonderful artists who were involved in env/prop work over the years on our end:
Frédéric Fouque (Lead)
Rodrigo Mizuno (Lead)
Álvaro Villanueva López
Axel Daboineau
Bart de Vries
Chloé Labbé
Dorine Laplanche
Eliot Velain
Ezgi Bulut
Florentine Postema
Jakob Gavelli
Malwina Czech
Mandy Waning
Marie Henry
Maxime Lecas
Nace Jelovcan
Rasmus Rye Thomson
Ricardo Sousa
Sasha Bernert
Tairo Fialho
Theoni Fotoglou
Valentina Mikhailava
Victor-Emmanuel Pancrazi
Much love the people of the Dragon team at Phoenix Labs, especially the treasured Art Director Josh Nadelberg, the ever-insightful Michael 'Orb' Vicente, Bryan Marony, Julien Allard, Andy Hansen, the amazing tech-art MVP Adam Gibson, all the wonderful concept artists who did such great work, Alex Newcombe, and the fine VFX ninjas. What a splendid group of people we got to be a part of! <3
Here's a small selection of the 3D work we got to do - please make sure to check out our Project Dragon gallery to see all the goods!
