mushroom Hop Cycle Playblast from Lauren Neighbors on Vimeo.

Sporus rig is finally done! After realizing clusters won't import to UDK, I re-rigged this guy with body and facial controls and updated the textures.
Rigged and animated in Maya 2012.

Environments, Textures and more characters- Week 4

Been jumping around helping out with environments and textures in my group...

 We have a "pebblestone" texture (remember, the player is shrunken down to miniature size)

 a VFX Firefly sprite we're going to use to bring bio luminescence in our node.

Photoshop rendered concept of Bugby's Exotic Ranch where our Dung Beetle pet will reside. Note the scenic mountains of poo in the back, initially an inner joke from our group upon realizing that mushrooms thrive around decaying things and fecal matter, which ended up working really well for our Beetle Ranch. We just need to make sure it's executed.... tastefully?

A simple concept for the node 2 entrance with corrupted thorns surrounding. I left the interior of  the log unpopulated because there were ideas already being modeled for it.

Now back to our mushroom character rig!

Mushroom Model- Week 3

link to "Sporus" turntable on Vimeo

Our mushroom is modeled and textured for low poly using 3dsmax 2012, Maya 2012, Photoshop CS5.5 and xNormal to bake maps. The mesh was triangulated before the rigging process to make sure there aren't any problems with how UDK automatically triangulates the mesh. Thinking ahead for less troubleshooting later although I still expect it!

More Concepts!- Week 2

  Here's an on-the-fly drawing of our topdown map to better visualize our node. Our main critique from Sony was to emulate Disneyland, which is where I used to work a few years ago so naturally I know it like the back of my hand.The Bazaar's forced perspective will be a lot like Main Street USA to make our node look larger than life at first glance. The winding pathway suggests a wait line for any ride that curves around different themed areas. Of course eventually you'll be led to the Shrine, a mixture of inspired ideas from Thunder Mountain, Splash Mountain, and the Matterhorn while still holding the main purpose of Sleeping Beauty's Castle. After exiting the shrine, Bugby's Exotic Ranch is much like the purpose of Big Thunder Ranch's dining area and petting zoo, except our node will feature a dung beetle ranch, scenic mountains of poo, and exotic foods ie chocolate grasshopper legs. Yum!

 

Finalized the color palette. Our "browns" in trees will be a muted desaturated orange.

 

 Quick digital sketches and semi-silhouettes of CapTown houses,  depending on where the house is located. A lot of our group members are amazing at modeling so I wanted to keep the concepts unified but allow for some individual interpretation.

 Beetle Pet character concepts. The chosen one is the bottom row center with the green wings.

 

Rough Chariot concepts - our beetle pet will be hauling cow pies.

I've always been one to keep a sketchbook. We are going to reserve the mold spore pet idea for the next node with more corruption, and probably not green since it looks like a giant pea, but we're thinking ahead to make sure we don't run into loopholes and problems later.

Concepting- Week 1

These are week 1 concepts and the finalized design of our main mushroom character for CapTown, our mushroom-ception environment node if you will, where the characters and environment are one as we have mushrooms living within mushrooms and eating mushrooms.

Let me bring you up to speed; Our city of CapTown has been invaded by mold and slime, and Psilo the Mushroom God has been run out of his palace and the innocent CapTown mushrooms are slowly turning corrupted into a crabby creature. The player must detect and clean up the slime and mold to return CapTown to a happy place and some incentive will result.

We are showing the corruption of character from design to color, as the innocent mushroom sprouts more and more legs and transforms from a happy orange into magenta into an "adolescent" and semi-corrupted gangly mushroom, to a dark teal purple and green crabby creature. However, our first node is where the player discovers the corruption, so we will only be finalizing the Orange mushroom because most of the node will be "uncorrupted". At this point we also want to create a pet for the node, will be posting some concepts and a map soon.