Orc Warrior #1 concept

I'm planning to start a new games character model for Turbo Squid and I've decided to go for an Orc this time. I've started by getting my tablet out and getting back into painting. I've used photoshop for this as usual. This time I've kept some records of my work in progress so I can show how I got to the final result above.

This is how I started. Using a fairly large paint brush set to a low opacity I quickly sketched in a rough form.

I then tightened up the Orc, still concentrating on the underlying form, not worrying about armour or clothes. I tend to work in quite heavily and then drop back the opacity, then create a new layer and work in again.

Next I put in the armour and clothes roughly, you can pretty much see the picture coming through at this stage. At this point I also flattened my working layer (not with the background, that causes headaches) and put a heavy blur on the whole thing. This is to stop me getting too tied down to the lines. By blurring the image I'm forced to rework. This stops me fiddling with details before I'm happy with the basics

 

It's then a matter of tightening further until I get something I'm happy with in the above WIP (work in progress)  you can see white cut lines running through the legs. This is where I've used photoshop to grab sections of the painting and move them. I try to keep the painting fairly loose and open to change as I'm working. If you look at the earlier WIPs, you can see the arms and legs went through lots of changes.

It always takes me a while to get used to working with the graphics tablet again, I think what bugs me most is zooming in and out. With a sketchbook this feature is accessed by moving your head nearer and further away from the page, with photoshop you have to press a button. My photoshop has a glitch where it jumps to a zoom of 12 pixels, drives me up the wall. On the flip side, when I'm using pencil and paper I often start thinking ctrl Z but of course there is no undo.

I think I'm going to go back to paper for a bit with the orc. I want to think through the armour a bit more. I'm considering having a version with leather armour, and another with more heavy metal plate armour. I also need to think about weapons.

Game Sprites

Here is a sneaky peek at the project I've just been working on. I recently finished working on my first sprite project and I loved it!. My client kindly gave me permission to show a couple of the characters here. I can't give anything away about game play or other details at the moment, but once it's released I will post links to where you can get a copy.

The bandit character playing an idle.

It felt like working on a proper game as all the games I used to play were 16 bit. By the time I was working in games it had all gone 3d. I have stuck to what I know, so as you can see, my sprites are 3d models that are rendered. What I've done is tried to inject all my happy memories of super nintendo carts and arcadey goodness into this project.

The difference is, because everything is rendered image files for sprites, I had much less to worry about: does it render, does if fit in the frame? job done. I've done bug fixing for games I've worked on in the past, (all 3d,) and  there is a lot more that can go wrong with a 3d model. Textures, poly mesh, riggs and animation can all have bugs.

This is the Bandit character. A simple mesh with cartoony proportions.

Sprite design was also great fun, because your dealing with something that needs to be recognisable at a very small scale, you can create very broad archetypal characters. They were great fun to animate.

The guards armour was another fun job to build and animate.

There are loads more characters to show and I am looking forward to seeing this one published. In the meantime you can see the guard and bandit animated below.

Chest Mimic #5 Animation Set Complete

I finished the Chest Mimic. It’s my second low poly games character for Turbo Squid and it comes with a full games animation set. The demo video is below (above the animation list).

Turbo Squid now require a render with a back ground so I made use of a certain temple Temple. Here are a couple more renders I did for the product page.

The render was a real ball ache for the demo vid, I used ray trace which is much slower than my usual depth map method. One of the renders took around nine hours and I also cleverly overwrote and had to do it twice. Not fun!

The good news is it looks peachy and you get to see all the animations! I think the animations worked really well on this character.



Here’s the complete animation list, I added a few thing since the last post.

20 to 49            Chest Mimic Walk Cycle       
60 to 92            ‘Chest Mimic Run Cycle       
110 to 136        Chest Mimic Chest To Mimic       
150 to 209        Chest Mimic Idle           
240 to 264        Chest Mimic Attack One       
290 to 320        Chest Mimic Attack Two       
350 to 374        Chest Mimic Attack Three       
400 to 465        Chest Mimic Death One       
490 to 580         Chest Mimic Death Two        
590 to 600        Chest Mimic Turn On Spot Left  
620 to 630         Chest Mimic Turn On Spot Right  
650 20 665        Chest Mimic Dodge          
680 to 690        Chest Mimic Fall          
700 to 710        Chest Mimic Land          
720 to 730        Chest Mimic Hit Reactions Front  
750 to 760        Chest Mimic Hit Reaction Left   
780 to 790        Chest Mimic Hit Reaction Right  
810 to 815        Chest Mimic small hit reaction Front
820 to 825        Chest Mimic small hit reaction Left
830 to 835        Chest Mimic small hit reaction Right
860 to 940        Chest Mimic Incidental
940 to 950        Chest Mimic Mimic to Chest
950 to 980        Chest Mimic Chest Form


Attack One also works as a jump, games characters have to have a jumping attack it’s the law.

As with the last games character I did (the Ninja) this model ticks all the boxes for game ready, a one piece clean mesh, zeroed, low poly and bind pose included. With these models I basically just build them to the same specs I did when I was working for games studios, in fact if anything they  are higher quality because I can spend more time on them.

Here's a link to the model on Turbo Squid.