Pixelherders Dota Sketchbook
polycounter lvl 18
Been thinking about doing some courier/item designs, so thought i'd post my progress in here
first was the idea for a courier - The old Man of the Forest
I put together a ref sheet and sketched out some initial ideas - its obviously pretty early stuff, but i'd be interested in any feedback anyone has.
I've plenty of other ideas too, so if this one isnt grabbing anyone's attention i'll move onto something else!
For movement i thought that normally he could use his staff as a support/cane, (also useful as a sun-shade), but when flying he could hang off it, while it flew like a helicopter...
first was the idea for a courier - The old Man of the Forest
I put together a ref sheet and sketched out some initial ideas - its obviously pretty early stuff, but i'd be interested in any feedback anyone has.
I've plenty of other ideas too, so if this one isnt grabbing anyone's attention i'll move onto something else!
For movement i thought that normally he could use his staff as a support/cane, (also useful as a sun-shade), but when flying he could hang off it, while it flew like a helicopter...
Replies
thanks, i think the flying thing could look pretty good in the hands of a decent animator!
any particular reason youre not keen on the character though? if theres something i'm doing wrong then fire away!
currently still thinking of equiping it with the same sort staff and flying mode as the above concept, but thats up for debate too...
Making him fly will be tricky. The staff is unique and to my knowledge hasn't been done, but I could also see him sort of abusing a bird and making it do what it wants. Sadly, birds that carry the courier is used a few times already.
i think i'll try the flying helicopter thing first, but yeah baboons can be jerks so might be good to see him harrassing a bird!
thanks for the comments chaps!
hopefully going to get into zbrush over the next few days and get something roughly blocked out...!
tried a first pass at fur - ended up looking like feathers, so going to try a different approach!
also whacked on a bit of colour, which seemed to go ok...i think!
Looks like a Mandrill to me. Or a mix between a Mandrill and a Drill
just got on my home pc and realised the colours on my laptop are a bit out of whack - its a lot more, er, "vibrant" than i intended. I'll sort it out though!
thanks! colour should be done in the next day or so...hurrah for bank holiday weekends!
yeah, good point! this is a quick thumbnail really, but i'll work out this and a few other issues as i go along...by the way, thanks for all the feedback, much appreciated!
*edit* has photobucket got worse recently? really noticing the artifacts - might need to look into some alternative, so if anyone has any suggestions...
will look into this - cheers!
*edit* for the sake of completion, heres some more sketches - quite keen on the "Helicopter Pole" flying version, but if people have a stronger preference for some of these alternatives then fair enough!
think the winged monkey might be worth a shot as a seperate model...
blocking out the accessories!
cheers! feels like its all about to come together (as long as i dont mess it up!)
thanks for that! having had a long bank holiday weekend, i managed to plough through a lot in the last few days...schedule is almost back to normal now, so things might slow down a bit. Fingers crossed it'll be done in the next couple of weeks!
ITS IN GAME. And moving!
...cant believe it worked
Which has been a right pain in the monkey nuts
there are lots of "auto-rigging" scripts, but a most of them seem only to deal with basic human figures with no obvious way of adding bits to the rig e.g. pouches, backpacks, magical flying staffs...
...so ended up looking at 2 that offered the flexibility to add arbitrary joints
zooToolBox/Skeleton Builder
http://www.macaronikazoo.com/?page_id=574
There were a few teething problems, but i eventually got it working by making sure to intall the older 2011 version first, THEN the newest one
http://www.macaronikazoo.com/?page_id=506
Also couldnt find much in the way of documentation so theres a bit of trial and error involved if youre a rigging simpleton like myself
Alternatively PKD RIG seemed to do a similar job and has some video tutorials so have a look!
http://pritishdogra.com/Downloads/PKD-Rig-System.html
Also its worth noting that once i had a placeholder rig and animation, i spent a few hours unsuccessfully trying to export it
In the end the animation export settings that *DID* work were these.
I dont know if theres anything wrong/stupid in there all i know was these were the settings that eventually worked
So still work to do, the rig for the staff is still up in the air, if you'll pardon the pun.
I'm going to stop scratching my head for a bit and go back to working on the lowpoly and texturing for the next few days.
Lopoly first pass done - its still over budget, but getting it down to 3500/3000 polys is fairly trivial now that i've got this far
Also managed to get round to designing and sculpting his flying staff. I *think* it should do the job!
Just Uv's + Texturing + Skinning left to do...how did 1 monkey end up as so much work?!
Now if my hand isnt cramped up into too much of a claw, i'll see if i can get an hour of bioshock infinite under my belt...
Need to figure out a way to colour the backpack/straps etc so they dont blend into the body tones too.
And the last couple of evenings have been lopoly optimising and uv-ing...
...and for both i ended up back in silo 2 after a long break.
Its a bit buggy/crash prone and development stopped years ago (which still brings a tear to my eye...what could have been!) - but its only 29 quid on steam and really helped speed things along.
Highly recommend downloading the 30 day demo if youre even slightly curious.
Just an Idea smaler feet bigger head to fit the dota engine ^^ (dunno if it will look bad then)
Because a lot of couriers have baby features (big eyes small mouth...) i think its so they dont compete with the hero models.
plus the flyign mod is realy awesome xD i like
thanks - there'll stil be some room for tweaks, like proportions etc, so i imagine that things will change before final
me too! hopefully within a couple of weeks there'll be some progress on that!
also tried using DOTA 2 Hero shader
still need to experiment with how all the various masks work, but slowly getting my head around it