Sunday 8 April 2012

The Thunderbird

Keeping the final model as close as possible to the native American totem pole I am happy with the end result.


High poly Thunder Bird

high polygon sculpt finnished for the Thunder Bird

Concept for Thunder Bird

Using the referance gathered i put together some quick sketchs

The Thunderbird

The Thunderbird is a legendary creature in certain North American indigenous peoples' history and culture. It is considered a "supernatural" bird of power and strength. It is especially important, and richly depicted, in the art, songs and oral histories of many Pacific Northwest Coast cultures, and is found in various forms among the peoples of the American Southwest and Great Plains. Thunderbirds were major components of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex of American prehistory. (Wiki)



To bring a bit more life to the sky’s of The Forgotten I looked into the Native American myths and came across the thunderbird.  Mostly seen on the top of the native totem poles throughout the Wild West the first step was to get as much research as possible.

Monday 26 March 2012

cross breeding gone wrong.....lol

Finished the Chupacabra creature and now it is ready to be imported into the Unity engine. The original design was supposed to look more rat/big cat like but throughout the stages of the design it ended up looking like a muscle induced pit-bull canine...but it works!!!


Friday 23 March 2012

Chupacabra base mesh and high poly sculpt...

Once the concept was finished I created a base mesh using 3D Max CAT rig panther as a guide line and rebuilt the topology around it giving me a good starting mesh for the high polygon sculpt

Final high polygon sculpt ready for the topology and optimising process

my twist on the Chupacabra .....

After some research I made a more defined concept using the reference found which let me create my own interpretation of a Chupacabra

The Chupacabra...

The chupacabra (or chupacabras) is a creature said to inhabit parts of the Americas. Though some argue that the chupacabras may be real creatures, mainstream scientists and experts generally contend that the chupacabra is a mythological creature, or a type of urban legend.(http://www.monstropedia.org/index.php?title=Chupacabra)
The next creature design....
After long research I wanted to create a big predator creature such as a wolf, lion, tiger or along them lines which led me the urban legend the Chupacabra.
I first started looking for as much reference as possible on the mythological creature

The Bosmagna....

After quick brainstorming with some students in my class we decided to call the cattle creature a “Bosmagna” which comes from the Latin language and translates as 
Bos (bovis) =   cow, ox, bull
Magna =  great,large


Thursday 22 March 2012

final cattle render/WIP....

finished the cattle creature ,just working on the Animation ready for Unity heres the wip renders..

Monday 19 March 2012

High poly done...

Finished the high polygon sculpt for the cattle its now ready to export to max for the typology process and bake the high polygon normal map to a lower mesh

jumping into Sculptris Alpha 6

For the high polygon model I have decided to go back to a program called Sculptris which is a free source modelling program .starting with a simple sphere here is a quick update on the cattle creature…still thinking on a name ??

Cattle concepts...

working from the earlyer sketchs and some referance on hippos,rhinos and cows anatomy whislt trying to keep it alien-like as possible

Wednesday 7 March 2012

UDK and Unity3D go to war!

Which will win the battle of the game engines ??


The Game Engines….
Our original intension was too create the game using UDK and I so progressed on to looking into how to make a custom character within the UDK engine. After spending many hours reading and watching tutorials on how to import your own character, changing the camera to 3rd person POV and setting up the correct coding it began to become very time consuming and a lot more difficult then the Unity engine.
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( Kind of what my PC screen looked like at times! )


Even though digging around the websites and finding out how to set up a working 3rd person camera for UDK was challenging and time consuming. I did manage to produce some progress with camera system and also looked into how to set up a cut scene within the game play.

Some of the first problem that began to arise was when I started to bring in a custom character into game. I made a “test dummy” model in 3D Max and used the free UDK character rigged model bones to apply it to my model. At the time I was unaware that 3D Max’s CAT (Character Animation Toolkit) was able to be used for each of the animations needed to create a custom character for UDK.


Once I had finally rigged it to the UDK model I them exported it from max and imported the model into UDK with very interesting results. Even more research needed to be done to find the problem.




After more research and lack of sleep reading throughout tutorials and walkthroughs, I now realize how the UDK can be one of the best game engines around. UDK has some of the most unique and very complex tools for a game engine and once learned can lead too some amazing results.


But giving our situation for self Initiated project and the time scale were giving, UDK in my opinion and for someone that does not know the engine that well is to find a quicker alternative game engine. UDK has some great features and beautiful graphics but at the cost of time consumption learning its key elements and learning a overwhelming amount of scripting/programming just to edit a simple game mechanic. Its now taken myself over a month and half to make a custom playable character and also cost me time that I could have had spent on making more game characters/NPC’s /ect. Although I will still research and learn the UDK engine as my study’s continue as i would like too maybe use it in future projects but for progression and the amount of time we have left on the project we have decided to go with Unity3D.


Due to the change from UDK to Unity I have also changed the ordinal site page name from UDK development to Unity Development.

      

Friday 24 February 2012

Main Character AKA Jack sullivan

After working on the main character for a while now i decided (early hours in the morning ) that he really could do with having his own name..oh and a very indepth background story :)

Character list



 
Made a list of all the possible characters that will be featured in the game.
This list will be used to keep track of what needs to be done and give me a rough idea of what I need to work on next as well as a rough idea of the time scale needed.

Main character

Cowboy/sheriff/playable

Non playable characters (NPC)

Human -

Town’s people: Male/female cowboys

                                      Male/female smart dressed
                                      Male/female dirty clothing
                                      Male/female working clothes
                                      Male/female law enforcers
                                      Male/female children
                                      Male/female drunken

Outside towns:  Male/female wanderers
                                      Male/female travelling merchants
                                      Male/female hermits
                                      Male/female scavenges

Creatures:                     Cattle
                                     Working
                                     Pets

Enemy NPCs

Human:                        Male/female bandits /thugs/wanted criminals
                                     Male/female savages
                                     Male/female bosses

Land creatures:            Mammals small/large
                                     Insects
                                     Flying
                                     Underground

Wednesday 8 February 2012

Monday 6 February 2012

Thursday 2 February 2012

1st Rough Concept


Finished the 1st concept sheet for the main character in the game to get a rough idea of what he may look like.
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Monday 30 January 2012

Research/Referance....


started looking at a range of character artists work and began to put together some referance sheets

Friday 27 January 2012

Self initiated game proposal

One of the things we had discussed before we had been given this project was the possibility of working in a two man team and splitting the job rolls equally as seen within the game design industry. After getting the ok we then went on to discuss what type of game we would be working on. The game will be set on alternate planet and be themed around a wild west/ steam punk wasteland.


    


For my part of the self initiated project I will be mainly focusing on Character design and implementing working models into the UDK game engine. One of the first processes I will be covering will be to design and create concept art for all characters within the game using suitable references and looking at other artist work for inspiration and ideas. The next step will be to work from the final concepts and create 3D models using a range of software such as 3DsMax, Mudbox, Zbrush, est. The final stage will be to get these models and animate them ready to be used within the UDK engine which will also involve looking into UDK script. My main target is to achieve a fully working playable character within UDK and also looking into the possibility of combat/interaction play within a working environment.