This week we are releasing a bunch of new media. The game's finally doing great, most of the most important bugs are fixed and things are feeling nice and balanced.
One of the new things we are featuring is the Captain of the Salty Rose (the diver's boat):
The story behind this character is that we talked about having some sort of captain on the boat during one of our meetings. The idea was to have an NPC that wouldn't be playable but would be there and may or may not interact with the divers too.
Nobody knew at the time, but I really liked the idea and secretly started working on it on my free time.
This is the first model I've done completely on my own (on the divers, Alex helped me out with the texture work and Myles did the shaders), which is something Im particularly proud of!
Making this character was incredibly addictive an fun, Im guessing that in total making the whole thing probably took me about 8-10 hours, which when you consider that the divers took about a month each really shows that I've really learned a lot working on Depth (still got lots of more learning to do!). For that Im really thankful.
(These two images are taken directly from UDK's editor)
I learned a lot about texturing (something I used to hate and now love), and also about UV mapping and a few new rigging tweaks (he's got a fully functional face with teeth and everything). I also spent a lot of time working on a specular map for him, which is something completely new to me, and I think that at the end it paid off.
As usual, I made a simple reference mesh and sculpted as much as I could in Blender, later exported to ZBrush to add finer detail, retopologized the model and finally I imported it back to Blender to work on the UV mapping, rigging and animation.
Im doing the smoothing groups in 3D Max for the moment because UDK doesnt seems to like the ones I make in Blender.
I still got some work to do on him, you can see a nasty UV seam on the wrist and I could probably add some more detail here and there.
As a nice little tip I'll drop for ya, I tried something new with the rigging in the eyes: I rigged part of the eyelids to the eyes themselves, so when they move the flesh around it moves too creating a very organic effect.
This definitely enters into the real of "completely pointless details that nobody ever is going to notice", but that's my favorite kind of thing, so if you are into it, try it out!
That's it for now, our beloved Myles Lambert updated our website with tons of details, so feel free to check that out here:
Depthgame.com
Alex-
