Group project:

After the group decided on a general idea and theme for out flight based shooter, i proceeded to create a rough storyboard to outline the events we wished to implement.

We then separated the individual elements of the game, and assigned each aspect to a member of the team, i drew the design and creation of the enemy's, and following a group discussion, we decided on a somewhat Giger inspired, bio-Organic Alien theme, a hybrid of flesh and machine, in order to create some dissonance between the human factions ships/space station and the enemies attacking them.

After several attempts to do some 2D conceptual ideas, i decided i was finding it to difficult to put the clear, but complex visions i had in my head to paper, so proceeded to jump into 3D in Mudbox and begin sculpting, keeping my visions, as well as conceptual designs done by George, firmly in mind.

THE ABOVE 4 IMAGES ARE WORK AND PROPERTY OF GEORGE BURCHMORE AND ARE NOT MY WORK, THEY HOWEVER FACTORED INTO MY LATER WORK.

Starting out from a simple sphere.

Using the grab tool i went about making the general shapes of the ship, using a sphere for the cockpit area, the main body of the ship, and the lower jaw of the cockpit/head.

Once i had the three basic components pulled out and arranged i re-topologised each section via the Mesh > Retopologise tool.

I then went about adding details, using tools such as sculpt, knife, wax, bulge, flatten and smooth, slowly adding layer upon layer of detail.

Once i had most of the detail in, i added some texture into the fleshy areas and the bone/armor plates using some of the standard stencils included with Mudbox, and the sculpt tool.

I created a very basic engine design in Maya, and exported this into Mudbox to attach to the ship.

The final sculpted model.

Once i was happy with the model, i exported 1 copy at full subdivision level, and one copy at the lowest division, both into Maya to create my low poly version for the game.

I used Maya to automatically map the low poly version of the ship.

Setting the low sub division level as the target, and the high as the sources, i transfer mapped the details across to create the Normal maps, then exported the resulting, low poly model, along with the Normals into Mudbox once more for painting.

The final ship, with diffuse, specular and Normal maps, inside the game in Unity.

A second, smaller variation, intended as a faster, smaller, lighter hitting attack craft enemy for the final game, however due to a realization that we had to lower the overall scope of the game, it is not clear if this will make it into the final submission or not.