Cast Away - realtime artillery game character

[Archvilell]

Hello all,

I'm on a team with 3 other artists, 7 programmers, and 2 managers, and we're making our own game from scratch. We call it "Cast Away" and it's a 3D, comical, realtime artillery game. You play as Captain Jacob, a ship wrecked sea captain stranded on an island with your rival, Captain Steve, stranded on his own island 20 feet away. Rather than team up and try to get back to civilization, your rivalry burns deep, and instead you both MacGyver up a catapults to launch crazy island junk at each other.

I'm the character artist of our team, and I recently got our main character done. With that synopsis in mind, I wanted to post him up online and see what you all thought of him. We're going for saturated colors, dark comic book lines, and slightly noisy textures. Almost like a Borderlands-ish kind of look, but more light-hearted and fun, less serious and intense.

We've already got this character rigged, animated, and in-game, so the mesh can't change, but the texture is not as solid. I'm currently making a second version (the rival you the player shoot at), so any mesh critiques you have I can incorporate into this one.

http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff43/Archvilell/jacobSmaller.png

http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff43/Archvilell/finalZbrush.jpg

http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff43/Archvilell/gameRes.jpg
[just under 6k tris]

http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff43/Archvilell/finishedTexture.jpg

http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff43/Archvilell/jacobAndCatapult.jpg

Here's my concept for the next character.

http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff43/Archvilell/steveSmaller.png

Thanks for looking! For more information on our game, look up "Cast Away" by Painfully Awesome on Facebook. Or check out www.benjaminday3d.blogspot.com for more character pictures and my workflow.

Ben

[waldo]

Where is herman's bananapicker :p

The character reminded me of MI.

Looks great by the way..

[ander]

One is Jacob and the other one The Man In Black?

When will we see Oceanic 815 modelled? :D

[Archvilell]

Haha yeah we got the "Lost" reference alot. My friends say I modeled the body after a caricature of John Locke, but I swear that's coincidence. I didn't even know who John Locke was until someone made me look him up, haha. We also get the Monkey Island reference too, which is good because we want the same light hearted cartoony feel. So thanks guys! I'm glad you like it so far. I'm ZBrushing the second character right now, I'll post some pictures hopefully later today.

[Skamberin]

Sounds fun and looks cool :)
Personally I preferred the red beard and blue eyes for the first cast away, kind of gave him a little more personality, but that's personal preference. I'd up the overall saturation and sharpness of diffuse on those textures to make the colors blend in less with the black edges too.

What platform are you making this for?

[Archvilell]

Hmm, a red beard is a good idea. We want to make them look like theyve been there awhile, so I was trying to add a bit more gray. But since he still looks kind of young, maybe a red beard would work. I'd have to change his bandanna color then. Good call with upping saturation and diffuse sharpness. With that in mind he does look kind of dull. Thanks for the tip, I'll work on that once I get this ZBrush done.

This is for the PC. I'm not a programmer so I'm not sure I know all the limits, but I know we're only allowed to use 256MB of RAM and there is some other limit set on the CPU and GPU. I dont know though. So to answer question, we developing for a crippled PC, haha.

[Archvilell]

Update: here's the ZBrush for the second character. It's essentially the same character as the first, minus the beard and bandanna. Instead he sports a straw island hat and an Old English mustache. I cut off his pants to make shorts, and gave him a boot on one foot instead of a sock. He is wearing the same shirt and is the same body.

This sounds like a cop out to avoid lots of work, and that's exactly what it is, haha. Our game has something like 70 character animations, and we won't have enough time to make unique animations for both Jacob and Steve. So we're using the same rig and animation files, we'll just swap out meshes and textures. So to ensure it fits on the rig, I'm trying to keep them as close to the same as possible.

Picture time:

http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff43/Archvilell/steveZBrush.jpg

[Archvilell]

Got another update. I finished the game res version of the second character typically played by the AI. He comes in at almost the exact same polycount as the first: just a hair under 6k tris. The UVs are laid out, I just got to merge all his pieces back together and arrange them in 0 to 1. The it's time to xNormal some normal maps and ambient occlusion.

http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff43/Archvilell/steveWireframe.jpg

Any crits or comments so far? Anything is welcome and appreciated!

Ben

[Snader]

This reminds me of Borderlands. I like borderlands. Though I think the black lines should adhere more to the folds and topology.

[tmim6]

These are pretty sweet looking! The game sounds fun. Characters look great. Im curious of what the texture is going to look like on the AI model. I like the main character, i agree with the red beard, I think it will give more characteristics to the character.
Awesome job.

[chrisradsby]

Looks really nice man, simple and good looking. Very nice texturing.

[Archvilell]

Thanks guys. We had a big milestone for our class yesterday, so today we're setting up tasks for the next milestone and fixing stuff we already have. His UVs are all laid out and ready to texture, but I might not get to it for a few days. Any other critiques for texture work on the first guy? I'm going to fix his texture while making the second character's. Haven't forgotten about the sharper contrast in the diffuse / higher saturation, and redder beard with blue eyes. Thanks for the tips so far.

Ben