Current progress on the Darksiders 2 weapon design challenge on the Polycount forums. Here are the competition’s requirements:

For this contest you will be creating a Mace, Axe, or Hammer that would fit in the world of Darksiders. One entry from each category will be chosen to be included in the release of Darksiders II! — That’s right! Not in a future DLC release or a digital download of any sorts – the winning entries will be shipped with the game when it launches!

Contest Rules

• Create a mace, axe or hammer that would fit in the world of Darksiders.
• Design must be original and cannot contain elements from copyrighted works, reference to other IP, or use of any image that you do not own.
• Design must fit within the themes of Darksiders (More info on themes below)
• All submissions are to be showcased in a single jpeg. The image must contain a render of the final weapon with and without wireframe, and must display your diff and norm texture flats. This jpeg should be of a reasonable resolution.
  • This is a real-time challenge. You may use any real-time renderer (UDK, Crysis, etc.) but you must not use any post-processing effects or advanced (read: “fancy”) rendering techniques. Vigil wants to see your artwork as naturally as possible.
• Top 3 weapons as chosen by Vigil in each category will be asked to submit their models for final assessment.
• Winning entries will be asked for all source materials used in the creation of the assets.
• One weapon from each category will be chosen to be included in the ship of Darksiders II
• One artist per weapon/entry only. An artist may submit an entry for each of the 3 categories.
• Submissions must be made to the submission thread no later than 11:00am CST on March 26, 2012

Weapon Specifications

• Poly Budget: 1500 triangles
• Texture Budget: 512×512 Diff, Norm, Spec (Emissive map optional)
• Weapon must match supplied proxy dimensions and scale.

Unfortunately, this does not carry through in the illustrations, but the center piece of the axe head is a pair of skeletal hands tearing the skull apart. Carrying on with painting tonight, hopefully starting modeling tomorrow.

The competition thread can be found here: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=96235

Sketches for the fire and water weapon set. The water set will be painted right after I finish the challenge for Darksiders 2 (see my next post).

With the elemental sets I tried to stay away from making the weapons look like their respective elements, and instead make them seem affected by the element. Therefore the fire set is covered in melted material and blisters, and the water set is one that an island refugee would use/make.