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I've grown my own organic chess set


Hello you,

This is my 3D project done during my 3D graphics course at SAE Institute Amsterdam, througout the last few months.

The assignment was clear - to make a chess set. No limits to the imagination besides the usual - a board, two teams, each team with one king, one queen, two bishops, two horses, two towers and eight pawns. The piece movements should be the usual as well, the horse should do the common "L" move, and the bishop would move in diagonals, so that the pieces would appear in the right places.

If the whole chess set would be original, the better.

Given my background in science, my idea was to build different organs and body parts. A brain, a heart, lungs, kidneys, the more organs the merrier.

The board would have to be original too. The first picture that came into my mind was Braveheart - the battlefield where blood is shed and body parts fly all over the place. In simple terms, rocks and grass. Lots of grass.

I started with my queen and king - a heart and a brain, respectively. It could be the other way around, this wasn't important. Then I did a set of lungs as one bishop, a pair of eyes as the other bishop. Here I started to go a bit off-road, where a set of something would be one piece, and each bishop or horse would be different from the other.

Then I made a liver, a set of kidneys, intestines, one ear and lots of hands in different positions as my very own pawns. On these pawns, my idea was that the hands would move themselves, have their own personality, instead of the common pawns of any other chess set, which need someone's hand to move them around.

My chess set would be a battlefield where we would see the organs collapse, hands would bend or give a black eye - literally. And the purpose would be to simply alert for the fragility of life in the battlefield. In the end, who cares? Looks good for a first 3D project, doesn't it?

Done with Autodesk Maya 2015.

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