Deranged Alien Invasion

Look out the aliens are invading Deranged Scratchings, these extraterrestrial fiends have been running the show round here for all of 2013, I may have managed to finally kick them out the door. I was unable to stop them multiplying and changing colour, they also drank all the beer and ate all the pizza.You can now get your very own invader from out of space. He is happy running around any 3d game and comes with his very own set of games animations, for more details click this Alien Invader Rigged & Animated link

Wub wub wub!

Red- "You're funny looking"                     Blue- "But were on the same side"               

I am happy with the way the colour variants worked out, I think I like the blue one best. I always seem to leave sorting out the team colours till last. It's a pretty easy and rewarding job, all the work goes into the base texture which was green for this character as green is the time honoured colour for men from outer space. Once the base colour is in place and looking good I separate out the elements which will remain the same on all versions, like scratches mud and also the bare metal details on this model. The next step is basically a colour tweak in Photoshop.

This is a longer than usual post so I added a jump break. To watch this alien eat his laser rifle and burp it back out again and to see the other animation you need to hit the read more button.

I put in a screen grab of the controls this time, Turbosquid seems to like it. You can get a feel for the world of grey boxes that is character rigging. It is the characters job to have the spark of life, the inner workings need to be utilitarian and functional. This character is well behaved and easy to control as a result of plenty of trial and error over the years.

Some details on how to control alien invaders.

This would look good with some wall mounted earthling heads in the background.

Below is the animation list. Thanks to Ki Ki for giving me the idea for the last animation in this set, I managed to get the alien to eat it's laser rifle and burp it back out again. The list is a capture of the character from Maya's view panel so you can see it running happily in real time. There is a nice suspicious look around animation in there as well. I like the idea of a paranoid alien, it fits well with the 50's B film genre that I'm trying to evoke. It would be great to build him a shiny hub cap style UFO to sit in.

Above is the Colour file for the alien with a wire frame overlay showing the characters polygonal shell. Below is the model with the colour file removed so that you can see the detail given by the bump map or normal map. The normal map was generated with Z-brush and Xnormal. Further below you can see the model with no texture files at all showing the wire frame so you can see the individual polygon faces.

Thanks again to readers who voted at the character concept stage, I hope you're happy with the way that Alien (in a jar with cyborg body) turned out. From the humble beginnings of a tablet sketch.....

an intergalactic being with B film charm has evolved. Who now can question that alien life is out there and that it looks sort of like a water cooler? Is it intelligent? Only if you can write good A.I. Even if it is dumb as a bag of nails at least it comes with a giant laser gun!