Jan Weßbecher
https://www.patreon.com/celsiusprime
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Chorus - Ship Design

© 2021 and published by Deep Silver, a division of Koch Media GmbH, Austria. Developed by Deep Silver Fishlabs, Deep Silver Dambuster.
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Back in 2018, I was working on the early visual development of the game Chorus at the gamedev studio Fishlabs. Have a look :) . I left about 3 years ago, and it finally released, so I was awaiting the moment I get to show off some of my favourites from that time. I had a huge stack of artwork to go through and was agonizing what to put in and what to cut out (maybe you know the feeling). In the end, I dumpstered, like, 90%. Its still a lot, but these are my darlings. I decided I'd show different stages for some of it, too, because I always find that stuff interesting, and maybe you do, too.

Here is a selection of concept work for the player ship. I had lots of opportunity to play around in blender and build prototype models quickly, that I then directly threw into the game in Unreal to test how the model would feel when flying (sadly no animations, ofc., but you can't have everything).
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Artdirection by Bleick Bleicken

Cheers to my team from back then, hope you are doing well!
Some uploaded their own work for Chorus on Artstation, have a look!:

https://www.artstation.com/prattatatat
https://www.artstation.com/timokujansuu
https://www.artstation.com/stefan_wacker
https://www.artstation.com/denisnovikov
https://www.artstation.com/sebi
https://www.artstation.com/bleick_bleicken
https://www.artstation.com/juan_puerta
https://www.artstation.com/greem0308
https://www.artstation.com/warby
https://www.artstation.com/cainy

The final concept I did for the player ship, a collaboration with Stefan Wacker. Have a look at the ingame model on his Artstation-Page!

The final concept I did for the player ship, a collaboration with Stefan Wacker. Have a look at the ingame model on his Artstation-Page!

I really liked the idea of the ship (who is sentient in the game) having an "eye" that would move around and look at stuff, like enemies or hazards, while you fly around.

I really liked the idea of the ship (who is sentient in the game) having an "eye" that would move around and look at stuff, like enemies or hazards, while you fly around.

Here is an earlier iteration that I built. One of the problems we had was it was too wide :D

Here is an earlier iteration that I built. One of the problems we had was it was too wide :D

Space for the guns was limited, and they needed to be retractable, so that always caused me a bit of a headache.

Space for the guns was limited, and they needed to be retractable, so that always caused me a bit of a headache.

One of my favourites of what I made in blender. It was supposed to be able to freely move its wings independantly and thus look very animated when it turns and rolls in flight.

One of my favourites of what I made in blender. It was supposed to be able to freely move its wings independantly and thus look very animated when it turns and rolls in flight.

Blender made it very easy to push out lots of variations in a short amount of time. At some point Blender 3.0 came around and I basically cried when I could make a folder structure and keep all these in the same file...

Blender made it very easy to push out lots of variations in a short amount of time. At some point Blender 3.0 came around and I basically cried when I could make a folder structure and keep all these in the same file...

One of the earliest concepts. It looked a lot more like a bomber than a fighterplane then. Quite chonky :D

One of the earliest concepts. It looked a lot more like a bomber than a fighterplane then. Quite chonky :D

As you can see, with blender 3.0 Eevee renderer came available when I was making these shipweapon concepts. I had to try it out!

As you can see, with blender 3.0 Eevee renderer came available when I was making these shipweapon concepts. I had to try it out!

Everytime I look at this, I feel like it should be turned around and the glowy bit needs to be in front. But you don't see the weapons from that angle in the game, so I kept it this way for visibility.

Everytime I look at this, I feel like it should be turned around and the glowy bit needs to be in front. But you don't see the weapons from that angle in the game, so I kept it this way for visibility.

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