“Look! He’s just a little guy!”
No he’s not! And he’ll stomp your face in if you think otherwise!

The Crabler is in 3D, guys!
I’ve spent the past few days sculpting and texturing this badboy up. It’s been a fast and fun process. Actually probably one of the most efficient characters I’ve done in a while. It’s not a complicated character though, so that definitely has something to do with it.

I’m pretty happy with how the 3D turned out compared to the 2D art. It’s pretty much dead on with some minor adjustments that my art director really liked! Hopefully he’s going to look really cool animated in our new desert environment scene.

The process is basically the same as every other character i’ve done. You can check out the latestIvory post or jump on to The Miner for more on my workflow. Or check out some sculpting videos ofThunder!

Thanks for viewing. I hope you like it!

Boy it’s been a busy week! We finally have some animation and functionality inside the prototype level and it’s already looking quite good.

Thought I could give you a quick visual update – a couple of new monster designs and the final rough concept of one of the first scenes in the prototype.

The Frog King is the antagonist of the prototype story. A pretty random character, but we liked the idea of having a mix of South Park’s Frog Prince and Futurama’s Hypnotoad as the quirky villain.

The Ice Monkey is not exactly a new design, but I don’t think it’s been posted before except for appearing in the early battle mock-up. Hanska has made the 3D model, but we were not too happy with the translation – mainly because we could not find a way to replicate the furry parts.

 

I first set out to make a new design for the Ice Monkey, but it literally ended up as a different beast entirely. For now I just call it the Panzer Lion.

 

It’s not much, but at least we have finally settled on a design for this tricky scene. We really had to poke the old dream sponge in order to find a layout that worked with the camera, puzzles, passages and overall theme of the scene. It’s a clever 2 story design where the player needs to figure out how to activate the elevator and then find a way to enter it. The elevator leads down to the giant blue grotto where the Frog King is performing his evil deeds.

 

Peace!

 

Just posting up our complete miner dude. He’s now rigged and skinned and ready for animation. Here’s some shots of him posed!

And a turn around video from Marmoset renderer:

Concept
The character was designed with a design follows function mind set. He works in the Crystal Excavation Site where his only function is to mine crystals and unearth the statue hidden in the huge stalactite discovered during the work.

We figured he’d have to have a bulky upper body, tree trunk arms and small legs, seeing as how he doesn’t use them a whole lot.

This guy is also the first NPC designed and made in 3D for Project FoM! We’re pretty happy with him!

3D
When doing characters like this, I always start in Zbrush. (High poly 3D sculpting package) I take a good look at the concept art, and try to visualize the model in my head. I go forth and block out the big shapes, concentrating on the silhouette first and foremost. After I got the basic shapes down, I start going into detail. I get to do all the little wrinkles and folds in the cloth, and the cool bulky anatomy. This isn’t a hyper detailed character though, so I tend to spend a lot of my time just scaling, repositioning and tweaking proportions. Cause it’s the silhouette and the proportions that make out the character.

High Poly Sculpt

After the sculpture is done, it’s time to make this bad boy into game res. I use Topogun for the retopology. Basically what retopology means is that I use the High poly as reference, and “draw” on top of it to create the new, lower res geometry. When the low res is finnished, I go into Maya to lay out the UVs. The UVs are esentially a 2D plane of the 3D geometry that is used for texture painting. When the low res model has uvs – It’s time to bake. Not cakes, but high res geometry and light! That’s right. I use a program called xnormal. What it basically does is it projects the high res detail onto the low res model. Using the Uvs as a canvas. That’s how the normal map and the ambient occlusion map is created. I use these maps when painting color onto the charater. So the character has light baked into the texture map, and a normal map that simulates lightning and detail information as another map. Making the model looking more detailed than it really is.

Texture map


Final Model

You’ll be seeing more of this guy when he gets his tools and is ready to move!

Here’s a character concept I designed for ProjectFoM. He’s the first (I think) NPC that’s been designed for the game. I’ll get back to you later on with where he fits in the world. We think it’s pretty cool! Can’t wait to show you guys! Anyways, here’s the mine worker NPC for now.

[UPDATE] I did the back view and refined his face. Here is the new version!

Thanks for taking a look!

Some sturdy armor for the brutal arena fights!

Since this is a development blog we will try to share as much as we can without spoiling too much of the story and setting. So I think it’s fitting to start off with some early sketches from the FoM’s very infancy.

We are currently getting our hands dirty with what we decided to call an art prototype; basically putting together specific scenes and characters and experimenting with effects, lighting, animations etc. in Unity 3D. This is a great way for us to find the perfect pipeline, workflow and tools, while the design team is hard at work figuring out the technical stuff.

Hopefully we have something goosebumpingly cool to showcase this summer. Stay tuned!

Hello world!

I’m the 3D Artist at SnowCastle games. I’m responsible for all the 3D Characters and props for our games.

Right now I’m working on a new version of the cute little companion, Gnart! He’ll be helping our main character in battle!

This is just the block-in stage – But we figured it might be interesting for some of you to see the process behind doing a character like this.

At this point it’s just a digital sculpture, hence the clay like material! He’s gonna get all furry and cute in the end.

I’ll be posting more images later on. Peace out!

-Hans Kristian