Aristocrat Colours

Just a quick update on the character progress. Have been UVing and texturing Mr Aristocrat and he is looking a lot like his concept now. I need to work on his face a bit more I think, particularly the eyes and brow. Also I think his head comes to too much of a point. Having said that I am looking forward to animating him, I think its going to be a lot of fun to get him on the cow finally :D

Environment Update

It's taken some time and effort but finally the environment warrants a blog post! The level combines the landscape with the track (through the use of a height map) and the more primary assets (without textures). I created these first so that Ian could continue with game development in the actual environment rather than the blocked out level.

The biggest struggle I've had over the last few weeks is the actual environment terrain. Unity has the ability to import height maps (grayscale images) to determine the height of the terrain you are wanting to create. This is great but it has taken a lot of fiddling in several different programs (XSI, ICE, PhotoShop and Unity) to get it right!

Below are a few images of the level so far (in the game editor).

Development Update

It's been a hectic past couple of weeks. So much so that I've neglected to tell you all what's been happening over here on the technical side. As Sophie has mentioned we have had some small issues with the rig and with the pipeline for passing animated characters to the engine. However, I am very pleased to tell you that we have everything working and that the cows are now happily running around our track.

That's right! While the animations were being worked on, I set about developing an AI network to allow the little critters to navigate their ways around. Unity makes it very easy to develop tools and I have ended up thoroughly enjoying what I thought might be a tedious aspect of the development process. Take a look:

Modelling update: Aristocrat

Here are some images of the Aristocrat. I have spent a long time on his head since the design was pretty weird. He is currently 7646 polygons. Little bit worried by the size of his head...

Full body:


Head:

Some Animation...

It's been a busy time here, lots going on, namely testing the engine. Having modelled the cow Ian moved on to rigging the creature. We went through a few versions of the rig as I tested and subsequently broke it several times. Here is the rough animation of the running cow used to test the rig and Unity. We still have some issues with the pipeline but we are close! Enjoy.

Trot:



Gallop:

And we have a cow...!

Here's the current status of the model of the cow. As you can see its reasonably close to the concept shown in my previous post. I have removed some of the angular bones such as the shoulders and hips and make the back line more smooth. I have also added horns as this just helped with the silhouette of the animal. This is a quick render (apologies for jaggies) and I have currently only made diffuse maps.