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I've had this idea for a game for about 2 years, over that time the story has changed from a Lovecraft fan game to a twisted story of addiction and dementia. Game mechanics have come and gone, with my favourite and most original ones being used to good effect in recent game outings(much to my disapproval!). After having spent two years developing a story, I feel confident enough now in creating the game. While the script is only half done, the story is all down on paper and although I'd like to say it is finished, it will probably be changed when I am writing it.
All I can say is that the first half is finished, so I will be working on the first half of the games content while developing the second half of the script. It may turn out that the final script is too much work for a whole game and I may have to split it down into two or three parts depending on how I feel.
For those that don't know, I used to teach 3dsmax at a local training centre, while doing freelance work on the side. I decided to leave my job and go about getting a degree in Video Game Design(then the lovely recession hit, but that's a rant for another time). Due to my experience in the subject I have convinced my lecturers to let me use my modules in a way where I will pass each one individually, but all the work will be put towards one big final project (it works in their favour having decent work being output from the university of course).
Luckily for me we cover all areas of games design, from sound design, to programming and 3d modelling. This has enabled me to ensure the work gets done over the next three years. By the end of the course I need to have something done to pass my final year whether it be a single game level with my mechanics put in, or the finished piece. I'm setting out a strict deadline to get all work done and I'll post that up here to get some feedback on what you feel needs more or less time. This should hopefully include the full list of what content needs to be created in the specific time slot and roughly how long I think it would take me to create each one.
I just thought I'd fill you in on what I am going to be up to for the next few years, this thread is mainly going to serve as a place to express my thoughts about the models in general. Because this is an total conversion of Unreal I can't really put a WIP post down and games design theory doesn't really get much traffic. For now I'd like your thoughts on the project in general and the models I'll be presenting. Right, enough typing for now, here he is.


He isn't final, he started of as a quick concept sketch and has developed a little more over the course of that past couple of days. All the scars represent something (that I'm not mentioning now.) One thing I just noticed before uploading is that the face looks quite bumpy, this is due to the shader and not my modelling. I quite like it though, but it isn't baked into the model so it won't show in unreal. I'll upload a shot without the textures and shaders on when I get the chance.

That is rather epic.

The anatonmy looks spot on, well i cant really analyse that deep from this hell of a cold, but from what i can focus on it seems very nice.

Hair, well i recomend using Plains or particles for the hair if you can since it will look like hes wearing a whole tub of clay in game.

He looks too uniform in his width, needs a to have a little more curve to his torso.

Great job anyway! good luck on your work, and i expect regular updates

Cheers mate,
I may have neglected to mention I haven't yet textured or modelled the hair, just roughed it out for now. Hell, I haven't even textured the face properly yet. I'll start on the hair tomorrow Still some problems I have with the lips and most of the torso too. The arms and trousers still aren't textured either.
I can kind of see what you mean with the torso, but he tends to look a little weird if I add a curve. I'll fiddle around tomorrow and get back to you.
I'm liking the crusty face more and more as I look at it if I'm honest. He spends the first portion of the game monologuing in your right in your face and the scarier he looks the better. I like the speeches that I've written for him at the moment, he tends to be genuinely funny, but also has a sick and twisted side that pokes through every now and again. Very Bipolar.
On a design side, I didn't want there to be one angle where he doesn't look messed up from. I went through a motion of having his multiple personalities mapped to different parts of his body, each being more visible depending on the mood he is in during the monologues. This tended to be a little too obvious from the outset so I decided to go with the scars depicting what they do now as it helps fuel the twist and make it all the more believable.
Anyway, I like to go on about this don't I?

The scars on his back are whip scars, they don't look nearly enough pronounced and the colour is to faded.

I think his arms are too long or his legs are too short, anyone?
I threw in a few creases and bulked out the legs a little bit to show roughly how the trousers are going to fall.
Also had a quick fiddle with the shader in ZB, prefer it much more now. (The back was rendered with the old shader.)

impressive, very detailed, i really like it

Rake tool much? Just kidding, rake is perfect for getting the pores in. Looks great Oolite, my only crit would be the skin texture / material. Caucassian flesh typically has a lot of blues and greens in it where the flesh is loose (in the eye sockets, bridging up to the nose, the extra flesh around the cheecks, etc. ). It looks like you've begun to add a little to it, but I think more contrast with the blues / greens / paled whites in these areas would make his flesh look more believable. To me it looks like he just came out of a tanning salon. By the looks of things you've got a bigger portfolio than I do, so take my critique with a grain of salt, but I've been going to college for this stuff for two years now and one of my classes is strictly fine-arts painting of the human figure, where we've been taught stuff like this . Again, even without it he looks great, I just think it'd add more believability to his flesh.

wow, this looks awesome, great work!

Cheers for the comments.

RUCCUS: I understand where you are coming from but it's the shader that's giving the tanned look. He is meant to be pale so here's a screen applied with just a bog standard light shader and the texture applied.

I know what you mean about variation on around the cheeks and loose parts of skin, but I'm afraid it will add too much life to him, which defeats the point of the character itself. I'll take what you've said into consideration and do a few quick paint overs and get back to you.

I did another shader test, trying to tone down the specular and the 'pinkyness' in the character, this looks better but looks a lot more fake than the other one. I might resort back to the old shader. A quick note to myself aswell, add some veins.


There is a slight surface bump on all of the model, I used the new surface noise tool whilst masking different parts away to do stubble and the different parts of his body. There are some bigger dents in his face that are just painted in with custom alphas.

The first level involves you waking inside your characters apartment, so I've started work on the items around the room. All of these are quick meshes, all created in the last hour or two. Far from finished. Please ignore the duvet on the bed, its quite shameful. The wooden part of the bed is only there as a frame of reference for me, the normal maps will be baked down at the end so ignore the fact the frame doesn't line up correctly.

And a leather desk chair.

It looks like you've done a cavity mask on the head and painted the lower recesses a darker colour. Is this what you did or is it just the shader working with different elevations?

It seems like there is a lot more detail in the face than everywhere else, that could be why when you're amping the specular up his face is getting a lot brighter than everything else. I think you're right in saying the second version looks a little faker than the first, but I would say mostly in the face because of all of the pores on his skin.

Something you might consider (unless you did this already) is doing all of the hi-def details on the skin (wrinkles, pores, etc. ) on separate layers in ZB, then you can tone them down to experiment with different values without having to go in and smooth / re-add detail constantly.

Although you probably did already do that in which case maybe just toning down the pores on the head might make him look a little less plastic. Then again not enough details would lead to a more plastic look as well . Its a hard balance I guess, but either way he looks great regardless.

I've got the face all down on a separate layer and I'm not baking down the surface noise of yet. I like being able to work on the two mesh while the noise updates according to what I do. Before I found out it could do this I was applying it straight away and having a terrible time when it came to smoothing down something.
It definitely was the fact I had too much detail across the face, I had already baked down some noise maps in the face and it was the combination of those that was sending the specular haywire.
The shader only really controls slight surface bump and colourising the texture map to a more skin like shade. Problem with that is that I'm not painting a black and white texture, which would be perfect for the shader.

So I've gotten rid of the colourising and toned down the surface bump. He's starting to look a lot better, but not as realistic as the previous shader. This is better for me anyway seeing as unreal will control the lighting and specular anyway. I think I need to step away from the face now and move onto refining the torso and starting the trousers. Maybe I'll have a clearer understanding of what is not looking right about the face if I step back for a bit.

Also did a little bit on the chair, adding some seams in and cleaning up some of the creases, trying to get it look like leather in case anyone wants to know.

looking nice man! Love the details.
The person really reminds me of ray liotta.

Anyway cant wait to see more.

looks good but a few tips:

it looks like you've applied noise for the surface texture, you only want to do that last, and i wouldn't recommend doing it at all, I'd make some custom alphas and just take my time to apply random imperfections ith it across the whole model (remember not to use symmetry at this stage)

also i was looking on the centeral forum and found this great thread, scroll down a bit on page 3 and there'll be these awsome fur/ hair alphas which'll make the hair look more natural
link:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?p=656628#post656628

also heres another thread that shows the sort of detail you can achieve using alphas
link:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?p=656551#post656551

If I can quote myself.

All the finer details are done with custom alphas and the finer surface noise is only there to help add an underlay of depth to the details I've added to the model. When I come to baking down the noise I'll mask out the parts that don't need the noise, or as much noise and then finally export the normal. I think things tend to look weird when alphas have only been used at key parts, because everything else looks too smooth. I also hate when things have that 'ZBrush look', where It's clear someone inexperienced with ZBrush has just gone mental with the preset alpha's, gets right on my wick...

Anyway, rant over. As I was saying, surface noise is an easy way to get a consistent pore looking bump to the entire model before refining the detail later.

i am aware of that, and i apologise, i was unaware that you hadn't baked the noise yet, i to hate it when people use the preset alphas to such a degree that the model is ruined