Empire Challenges | May 2020

Welcome to The Empire Monthly Challenge!

You are all welcome to stretch your artist legs. Get out of your comfort zone or artist block, and unleash your full potential!

There are no winners or prizes, it's all about challenging yourself. The deadline is purely to indicate the start of the next challenge, if you need more time to finish up that's okay.

In this challenge we want you to take a juxtaposing style and object and make them work together. This can mean you convert the Doomblade to a device used to chop trees (or threaten Tom Nook...) into the Animal Crossing style, or take the Ladder or Shovel and turn it into a tool of ultimate gore that Doom guy can use.

Whilst you can definitely do a pure style and texture conversion, we'd love to see you get creative and concept the props. Maybe a fishing rod From animal crossing has a giant spike to hook onto Gargoyles, or the Chain gun fires seeds to plant roses in your village.

With the recent hype around both Doom Eternal and Animal Crossing we want you to create some iconic assets from these franchises. Here you get to make the legendary Super shotgun from Doom in all its hellish glory while also being able to go into the more simplistic and stylized Bells pouch.

The Super Shotgun is one of the Doom guys most used weapons. It has been with him to hell and back, literally. Make sure you capture this personalized and used look of the gun!

For this challenge we want you to take a dive into the hellish world of Doom while have a nice tropical holiday in Animal Crossing. You are tasked with creating one of the pillars that holds the very structure of hell together while also taking a well needed break with some lush tropical palmtrees.

The pillars of the hellish halls have been there for a looong time and demons are not very cleanly creatures. Keep in mind how the passing of time affects its different materials. Metals start to corrode, woods starts to dry while dust and dirt gathers up. Could you then use these pillars in you animal crossing home?

The palmtrees of Animal crossing are some of the most lush ones out there. Make sure you capture the round shapes and heavily saturated greens in them! But could these then become palmtrees from hell?

Animal Crossing, Mars and hell are quite a far away from each other. Or are they? For this challenge we want you to create the red landscape of the marsian surface with mountains impact craters and all! But sand gets everywhere, so in order to give you some change of scenery you are also tasked with creating the soft and lush grass from Animal Crossing.

These surfaces might seem simple and plain at first but have a close look and you start to notice several things that you need to consider. Take note of how the craters of mars look, how they would impact softer soild compared to hard soil. And notice how the grass surface isn't just a plain green, it has some soft color variations in there, while triangles of different colors serve to give some breakup to the green.

But we must ask the question, wouldn't the Doom guy be a bit tired of sand by now, maybe he wished mars had a bit more grass. Or maybe you are allergic to grass and don't want that much of it, so let's add cover the grass up with a bit of marsian sand.

While hell normally is an awful place (unless you are Doom guy), it is a wonderful place when it comes to computer performance! The game is famous for running well on all kinds of low end hardware, and one step the developers have done this is through a clever use of trim sheets.

For this challenge you are tasked with recreating some of hells most used trims, the grate edge or the sci fi structures.

While the name is the "grate edge" the task is not focused on just the edge, several parts of the grate can be part of this trim sheet that allows it to have a good level of visual breakup. Make sure you capture the different parts of it and showcase the different shapes that can be built from your trimsheet!