The same technique is used with the weeds that hang on the creature’s back those are simple sheets of flat polygons with a cutout texture applied. You can also see that the spiky hair on the edges of the legs are actually flat polygons which will receive a texture to give the impression of many little strands bunched together. But the important thing is to make certain that the overall silhouette does not show large straight edges so that the illusion of it being higher-resolution is not broken. The impression of the model being highly detailed is going to be preserved thanks to the use of a normal-map texture (not shown here). The quality of deformations depends on it. Since the model is obviously going to be animated I need to make sure that the topology allows for bending the limbs in a practical way. The low-res mesh envelops the high-resolution mesh so that the volumes are maintained. There, I create a lower-resolution of the model, which is destined to be used in-game. Now that the model is almost finished in Zbrush, I export the high-resolution mesh back into Maya. So the next phase will aim at getting a model that can eventually be animated and used in-game. The model is not painted yet and it is so dense (several millions of faces) that it would be absolutely impossible to use it in a real-time game engine. Otherwise all this work would pretty much have to be redone. Of course at this stage I need to be fairly certain the model is not going to change drastically in terms of appearance. It is capable of dealing with huge amounts of polygons and allows the user to imprint the minutest details directly on the model’s surface. To do this, I subdivide the model a few times so that there is enough resolution to accommodate those detail the faces become so small that you can’t see the individual polygons anymore.Īgain I use Zbrush which is an excellent sculpting tool (despite its somewhat unintuitive interface). Once I’m fairly happy with the overall proportions, the next step is to start adding tiny scratches and bumps to the surface in order to imbue a more organic aspect to the creature. Note that at this stage I already know I’ll have to open the arms of the creature so I can get a better look while sculpting. But starting with the arms folded ensured that the crab would eventually be able to get into that pose later on. Again, not caring too much about details yet just roughing in the main volumes. Then I start to work on the body parts in Zbrush (bottom picture), simply refining the broad shapes. It’s best to check that everything looks as expected now (in terms of overall morphology), as it will become more difficult to change things further down the line. As you can see, it’s all very blocky and I do not worry about details at this stage. It all starts with a simple cube (within Maya), followed by other cubes to roughly represent all the body parts and get a feel for the overall volume of the limbs. Before starting to work on the model, I always surround myself with visual references (photographs, paintings) and make mental notes of aspects I will emphasize in order to end up with a model that’ll be interesting enough. As a side note, I’ll have to spread that presentation over several updates, as Indiegogo only allows for one picture per update. For those of you interested in the more technical aspects of the game’s development I thought I would present the method I used to create the crab model.
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