For my entry, I’m going to be doing a cartoony steampunk image from the story about Daedalus and his son, Icarus, trying to escape Crete using wings made of wax and feathers. In this case, however, the wax and feathers are going to be replaced by a steam-powered flying machine.
Preliminary sketch of Daedalus.
This is a preliminary sketch of Icarus. I’m not totally sold on this design, so I’ll keep working on it and trying different ages and looks. I like the idea of him wearing aviator goggles, so maybe I’ll give him a scarf and leather cap as well.
I’ll post concepts for the flying machine soon. I definitely want it to look like a death trap that only somebody completely nuts would try to fly, so it’s probably going to look like it was cobbled together from spare parts in the final image. I’ve been looking at a lot of pictures of early flying machines, so my inspirations will probably be evident in the final product.
Icarus just seems like the perfect myth for a steampunk challenge. I’ll be watching this thread.
Just noodling around with a more stylized Icarus design. I find this one more appealing, but I’m considering going with something a little older.
I like your comic design of Icarus. 
I was thinking about something of Greek mythology, and Icarus legend seems most interesting for this topic.
Hey man… Welcome to the challenge. Very nice characters! I like… Fun to see what they’ll be up to! Keep it up, good luck!
-Niklas
I’ve been scouring the web trying to find inspiration for this flying machine and I think I’ve finally come up with something I like.
Some of the things I wanted to include were a steam engine (of course), bat-type wings reminiscent of early experimental flying machines, props like you might see on an airplane and a seating area like those from horseless carriages. I also wanted to have big cogs and flywheels that would look cool even if they really didn’t serve any practical purpose.
I’ll have some better concepts up as soon as possible. I’ve been brainstorming for the past few days trying to come up with a flying machine design, so now that I’ve settled on something, things should go faster.
I’m trying to get a feel for how the cliff should look. It’s difficult to get rocks to look good, especially when they’re supposed to be cartoony, but I think I’ve found a good way to get things to work. A major inspiration for the look of the rocks was the way they did the big, chunky rocks in Team Fortress 2.
This is a screenshot directly from the Mudbox 2009 viewport with the ambient occlusion filter turned on.
This is one of a few different compositions I’m trying out. I’m really interested in doing something with extremely forced perspective and a very wide or tall aspect ratio, but I’m not sure yet what will work best. I know I want the characters to be very prominent, so something that has the flying machine close to the camera would be good, but I also want the flying machine to be pretty easily readable.
The cubes trailing behind the flying machine blocks are going to be gears, pipes and other assorted junk falling off in the final image. There’s also going to be a trail of smoke and steam.
I definitely need to adjust the angles and the shape of the cliff so it’s readable as the edge of a cliff instead of what looks like a really tall mountain.
After seeing OKMER’s “Bava.Captain of the 4th Hamu Sky squads” concept, I thought I’d take a page from his design and have another go at the flying machine design. That said, I’m not going to be completely ripping off his design; the flying machine’s going to have wings and a propeller and it’s probably not going to be nearly as ornate or finely detailed as his design. I’ve really been slacking as far as working on this is concerned, so this was just the push I needed to get me working on this again.
I’ll be posting images of the character and machine models soon.
This is a preliminary sculpt of Daedalus’ head to try and get a feel for what he’s going to look like in 3D. He’s missing his beard as he was sculpted from a cube and it’d be hard to get the long beard looking smooth without an insane number of subdivisions.
My concepts have been pretty flat and two-dimensional so far, so bringing the characters into the third dimension is a bit of a challenge. Doing preliminary sculpts like this gives me a good idea of how to approach my concepts in three dimensions. Once I’m done with this sculpt, I’ll throw one of the middle or lower subdivision levels into Modo and start building the final model right over the top.
What you see here is a couple of screenshots right from inside Mudbox 2009.
After taking a bit of time to try and solve some compositional problems, here’s one of the things I’ve come up with.
It’s similar to a previously posted test render, obviously, but it has some of the elements I knew I wanted but wasn’t quite sure how to include all in one image; a character large in the foreground, the edge of the cliff, a trail of smoke and debris in the air, the sun and, even though it’s not very evident in this rough sketch, waves crashing onto rocks at the very bottom of the image.
I’m not yet sure how I’ll include Icarus, but I’m considering having another flying machine silhouetted against the sun.
