Animated Start Screen

Years ago I was hired as a UI designer at Volition to work on a very stylized game called "Underground." Recognizing the console market was going in a more hardcore direction, THQ pulled the plug on funding and Underground was cancelled.

A Batman movie was coming out and companies were bidding for the license to make a Batman game. We darkened the levels in Underground and replaced the main character as part of a demo presentation for the license bid. I made this as a start screen for the playable demo.

EA outbid THQ on the project, so our Batman game was never-to-be. However, the game's 3d engine was upgraded from PS2 to Xbox and we began development on a now well-known franchise called Saints Row.

So in a weird and roundabout way, this start screen was once at the front of a prior incarnation of what eventually launched as the first Saints Row! (kind of.)

I didn't have much time to do this, so I worked through the weekend to put as much love into it as I could. I modeled & rendered this in Lightwave, and the whole thing was created with extensive use of Lightwave's powerful boolean tool. No other 3d software has such a powerful or clean boolean system, and most 3d artists work around that without realizing how fun it is to slice & dice polygons with no limits!

I wish I still had the hi-res renders, but the best I have is a slightly higher res animated GIF here:
http://www.junkyardcomics.com/ss6/gifs/bm-menu.gif