Friday update, village w.i.p

This was a good week, we've got a lot of work done and we've got a green light to work at home.

At the start of the week we did a mocap session with the xens suit at school. Everything went well with the motion capturing itself but it seems the files we let the program spit out aren't ready to use in motionbuilder. We think it's because we didn't stream the data directly into motionbuilder and exported fbx files from the MVN application. So our tutor Maurice Hoogwerf is looking into that right now, based on what he comes up with we'll either do another mocap session or do it the old fashioned way with keyframing.

Even though mocap didn't go as planned we still have some work to show. You might remember the village concept from last week, well we're working hard to make that concept real.

Here's a work in progress scene of the village, the assets are based on the concepts we did earlier and we hooked up a day and night system just for the awesomeness of it. The skydome is just a cloud image from google and we're still going to create a custom one. We also want stars to shine at night, but that's all details, we'll do that when we complete our primary goals.

We've done some modeling for the village now, but before we start working on the other scenes we need some layout concepts.

First up, the forest. The forest scene will contain trees! No surprise there, but these trees are pretty high, and at points you'll find huge tree mushroooms that cling to the bark. These shrooms can be used as platforms and can take you to a higher level in the forest.
At the center of the forest scene we'll have a huge mountain, which will be higher then the trees themselves. So when you reach the top of this mountain you'll have a fantastic view.

Second is the wasteland. This scene has terrain that goes up and down all over the place. A huge crater appears as you leave the forest, nothing will be the same after you reach that point. This place is inhabited by demons and you'll have to fight if you want to survive. A safe zone in this area is an underground camp in the center of the level, perhaps inhabited by dwarves. You'll just have to wait and see. :P

That's all for this week, please come back next week for another update on the project. :)

Big update

Major update, we've done a lot since the last update.

Demon concept

From demon thumbs to final concept.

Hud concept
Hud concept sketches with a mockup of the ingame one.

Village concept
Concepts of the village and whiteboxing of the layout.

Moodboards
We've redone the moodboards for the village, forest, wasteland, church and demons.

Finally

Kyria is rigged and ready for mocap.

(this image is for fun and not kyria's real anatomy)

Kyria texture, diffuse only

Kyria's texture was actually done yesterday but I gave it some polish tonight. 

Here's a small preview, but no multi-angle screenshots for you yet. We want to keep that a little surprise. ;)

Meanwhile Diane is doing awesome work on the demon concept art pieces. If all goes according to plan we'll have 1 small, 1 medium and 1 large demon running around in the game.

We'll that's all for this small update, we're going back to work!

Headphones, check! Music, check! Wacom, check!
Into the night we go!

Model update

So while working at home today, we finished the kyria mesh.
And also made a nice uv-layout (which took alot of time). :P

Modeling - done
UV's - done

Next up, texturing! And then rigging.

When the kyria mesh is textured and rigged we're planning on using one of the school's mocap suits. Diane has started doing research on mocap and motionbuilder and hopefully the suit will save us a lot of time.

Village moodboard, concepts

One of the three environments we're including in the game is a village area. The player won't encounter any monsters here, only friendly npc's (non playable characters). The npc's all have their own lives, stories and problems. You might even be able to help some of them out by doing quests for them, of course they'll reward you properly for it.


Diane:
Diane and I wanted the element of water in this particular village. So Diane went on to create a moodboard with images of houses by the water and also on the water. Mixed with some artworks this moodboard will give us the basic feel for the village.

With the mood set Diane made a quick sketch of the basic layout of the village. We discussed some ideas to make this village unique and fun and we decided it would be build in an ascending fashion against the side of a hollow cliff. Yes, we now have a Water/Cliff-based village.

Richard:

And here are some more detail sketches on what kind of architecture and items you might find in the village.

Churches yes

After we show our fancy startup logo's the first thing you'll see in the game is a Church scene. This old church has been chosen by the group of fighters that call themselves the demon hunters (needs a fancy name). These warriors have adopted kyria, so this church will be your home for a large part of the game. We've chosen this church to be the background of the title screen because we don't have time to go into the design of this 'hub' and more importantly what you can do there.
But we wanted to show what the church looks like anyway so we threw it in the title screen to set a nice dark mood at the start of the game.

I've been slacking a bit on updating the blog, mostly due to holidays and what not. But we have been working! So expect some more updates soon. :)

Here's some work on the church:

Diane: 

Made a moodboard with details like chandeliers, big doors, archways, etc. Stuff we had to have in the church.

Richard:
Sketched basic layout and rough details of the church interior