UGAC - CHARACTER 101 - AMBIENT ARTHROPOD - Imagus

#1

All right… I’m in. Not sure how this will go, but I’ve got a concept I really want to run with. Not near a scanner, but will post concept art as soon as possible.

Ganbatte! :thumbsup:

#2

This creature is called a “GunBug”. It is loosely based on the common beetle, and is a tribute to the old-school, Nintendo-style creatures of yore. It is designed for an adventure/RPG-style game or other platformer along the lines of The Legend of Zelda:Windwaker, or the Super Mario 3D games (Sunshine/64).

Here’s the original concept art, in glorius Ballpoint-On-Sticky-Note-O-Vision™.

In this design, the gun is strapped onto the GunBug’s back. However, I’m thinking it might be cool to have it hidden inside the body when at rest. To fire, the shell would part, the gun would rise, and the shell would slide back into place around the gun shaft.

And yes, the “Point Forward” text and arrow is part of the design for the texture… other fun details may be added as well. :slight_smile:

Now, on to the modeling!

(P.S. - First CGTalk WIP :D)

#3

Heh. This one looks cool. Good luck with your first ever WIP! :smiley:

#4

Did a little bit yesterday, then a bit more today… probably about 4-5 hours altogther. The mesh still needs a bit of tweaking, especially the legs, and I have to work the mouth and gun strap into the topology, but it seems to be coming along nicely so far.

For now, I’m going with the gun strapped to the back design for simplicity’s sake, though the polygon count would probably support the extending gun design as well. I may use the extra polygons to refine the detail of the model, or I may get ambitious and decide to try modeling the extending gun after all.

Currently 696 polygons, triangulated.


#5

Ah, looking good, man! You should set up the smoothing groups on that beast.

#6

I’ve actually never dealt with smoothing groups before. I have used a smoothing angle in Lightwave to prepare objects for import into UT2k4, but that was a single value for the entire object (I think).

I did some research. From what I’ve found, you are allowed one smoothing angle per material per object in Lightwave. Therefore, I’m guessing that, to create smoothing “groups”, you create a new material for each individual area, then specify a smoothing angle for each material.

If this is wrong, please let me know… any help on smoothing groups and their application in Lightwave will be greatly appreciated. :slight_smile:

#7

sorry, mate, don’t use lightwave.

Smoothing of different parts is achieved differently in different apps. In some, like MAX, you set smoothing groups per group of faces, in some you do it per material (im guessing that LW might be like that from what you found out), in some you define hard edges that separate the parts.

If all else fails though, you can always separate the model into the parts and then rejoin them, so that the different parts are not connected with the same vertices. That’s not recommended though, as it creates alot of extra vertices (Blender for example didnt have a way to do it until recently, so sometimes its the only option).

#8

This update:

  • Cut gun strap area into model geometry
  • Cut mouth area into model geometry
  • Added materials and smoothing (LW allows one smoothing level for each material)
  • Tweaked geometry
  • Finally remembered to add antennae

Current Polygon count: 873 (triangulated)

Here are the shots:

I’m a bit concerned about the topology on the side of the shell… I’m not sure it’s “game-ready”, especially the cross-cut toward the front.

I’m going to continue tweaking the geometry. Once it’s ready, time to unwrap the model and start working on texturing. C&C welcome.

#9

Haven’t had a chance to work on this over the last few days, but I’m looking for some opinions/thoughts on texturing/shading…

When I first started working on this, I had Windwaker-style graphics in mind. That is, really simple, flat-shaded, cel-style characters. I’ve considered doing this for GunBug™, but I’m wondering if it’s a bit of a “cop-out”, as it minimizes the texture work.

If it seems like it is, I may create both a cel-shaded and traditionally-shaded version for the final submission.

I rendered a spin test of the bug in cel-shaded form, and it looks pretty cool… I’ll try to remember to post the AVI and link to it later.

Any thoughts/opinions/feedback is more than welcome.

#10

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