Behind the Scenes: Fallout Illustration

This one came as a no-brainer immediately after I had the chance to binge the new Fallout TV show. After we go the Last of Us last year, it's so amazing to see another high budget game-inspired show, that delivers good TV, while being true to the source material at the same time.

I remember playing first Fallout on my PC when I was a kid and even then, I couldn't help but love the game not only for the gameplay, but for its world building and attention to detail. I clearly remember admiring the retro-futuristic somewhat 60's inspired setting even without understanding the role and genres of aesthetics in games or movies at that time. 

Only after some more time after gaining some knowledge and work experience, I could understand and really appreciate these artistic choices, narration and even UI and the role of illustrations and fonts in a setting like this.
 

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I thought a bit about the first piece I should make, but it didn't take long to land on the vault room. It's one of the basic premises of the game and it's the first thing you come in contact with when starting your gameplay. Additionally, this idea plays nicely with my style and complements other room designs I did.

When making a game inspired design, it's easy to get locked into pre-existing visuals and layouts from your reference board. But I always look for ways to make the designs somewhat unique. If you place some of my isometric room designs next to each other, there would be clear connections between them even if one is Jurassic park and the other is Star Wars. This is because I always try to abstract the essence of the objects in the scene and create them using simplified approach with some degree of naivity. 

For example there is a way how a standard stair railing looks in my head, and if it's not necessary to give it some distinct style (gothic or art deco), I will always default to that simple design from the top of my head.

Then there are some select assets or objects, that are iconic and need to be represented in a way familiar to the viewer. But even then, I try to extract the essence of what makes that object recognizable, and then simplify the rest. You can see this in the Nuka-Cola vending machine. The shape is familiar, but more you go into details, you would recognize the liberties I took to make the object fall into place with other stylized objects.

And the sketching process helps me with this tremendously. Without making a single vertex, I can test out different ideas and relationship between them in the layout. Define the proportions, scale and adjust the amount of detail I need to make the scene work. It also helps me to balance the iconic and generic. If you inspect the final render, you will see, that there are only three things that make this a Fallout scene. The vending machine, robot in the front and the sprocket-shaped vault door. And even then, the vault door has only the sprocket shape and vault number to tell it's a Fallout vault. Otherwise, it looks like no particular vault door from any game.

Finally, there are some smaller details that underline the origin of the design. References like "VAULT 13" (from the first game) but more importantly the fonts and graphic style used. This is where I always spend some time researching the original fonts and designs and try to replicate them to sprinkle the final design with  a touch of the source material character.

You can watch the process video on Youtube.