So look at that, the sketch for the lock mechanism on the mummyray resurfaced somewhere in my stack of sketches and to-do things. So I thought I can share that with you here and show more steps of how that final lock element came to be

everything is there, the decorative rotary dial at the top as well as the number pad (with a few buttons less than in the final version) and some cables connecting the top and bottom part...

before this I did draw everything by hand, but there I wanted to take my newly acquired blender modeling skills to the test and modeled the mechanism in blender like I envisioned it.

blender lets you also render out a cryptomatte pass that gives every element (or material) a unique color. This makes it very easy to select that element in photoshop when painting over the basic render. Making selections in PS otherwise is a very time intense and sometimes frustrating work, but using the perfectly fitting cryptomatte in the same file and the magic wand tool in PS to select one flat color allows you to paint in on the 2d image rendered from the 3d model.

it kind of looks even more scifi-ish in those colors, like viewing it through the synthwave neon cyberpunk goggles this game doesn't even have. But we can revive ancient tissue with the high tech mummy-ray apparatus, this and what comes from that is interesting enough already...

After painting over the basic render from above the final screen looks like that

I added some grime and rust and engraved text and symbols and also a blurred out background image that should be the main chamber of the pyramid in the game. Of course there are some animations playing in the small display on the right and I made some digits to display on the screen as well. All those additions could have been done via more textures in blender, but for still images like this, the overpainting is way faster and thanks to the cryptomatte very easy. 

When shrunk down to game size of 320x200(!) pixels, just like those classic Lucas Arts adventures, it looks even better, I touched that up some more on the pixellevel in the lower resolution and those blue cables look so much better and were so easy to make when you can easily select them all with a few clicks...

and that is the final screen that appears in the game and has some logic behind the buttons on it and lets you unlock the mummyray after finding out about the unlock combination.

Do you like such posts with sketches and progress of some scenes? Tell me in the comments and I might even make more.