Into the deep.

I don't know how well this will look on other monitors with the darkness and what not but anyway this is a design for an underwater segment leading up to the previous concept (if you can see it)

Bringing it all together.

First things first, as much fun as it is to concept I can't but help worry on the fact that I'm blindly making stuff up without much point to them - so I though it'd be best to settle on a plot and direction for the level so I can focus on pushing that further. Fortunately the idea can still tie together what I've already done, but its going to be helpful from this point on. I've decided that the objective is to get from A-B, by various exploration methods like climbing, crawling and swimming (simple enough right?). A-B will provide the player with as much eye-candy as possible, which is why concepting is important. And finally - for Point B, Ideally I want a confrontation between Penguin and Thrallhalla...If I could Id set up a boss fight I would be overjoyed- but my struggle here is technical and personal limitations such as time and setting the mechanics up.

The main theme of the journey will be 'Approaching danger' like with most games and films, environments become more reflective of their present evil as you progress. Priorities are visual stimulation rather than game play mechanics, I just don't think I'll have the time to set everything I'd like up.

Anyway, heres a sketch of an approach towards Thrallhalla's domain.
I had two ideas - The water pool at the bottom will be where'd you surface from, and the path leading towards this would be an underwater stage. You would simply climb out the water onto the snowy path and make way for the gate.
The Second idea was the water pool would extend from a narrow waterway valley/cavern which you could use a row boat to travel on. probably would be cooler.

Domain

Feeling extremely exhausted today, but I've managed to push out another concept. This is a sort of entrance way, it could be a good first vista to start off the level - having some kind of high-walled/crevasse type path leading towards it. Or it can serve as Thrallhalla's domain - looks sinister enough.

Polar Pass

Polar Pass - A network of tunnel systems that links to every other village from Frostin (Penguin's home village) underneath Mount Frost Peak.
I'm going to try and blend together an 'around the mountain' and 'through the mountain' approach to these network tunnels. I do like the idea of going underground to get to places, and it wont be anything like sinister dark caves, but it gives the player a nice break to step outside for a bit too. These are initial concepts, so hopefully more revisions to come.

Icy!

UDK begins...

I remember, before even writing up my final brief that if I were to do an environment I would have to make it third person, and doing a little research I was quite put off by the look of Unreal script. I didn't want to tamper with anything outside of my comfort zone. But recently I've been thinking, that maybe 3d character art just isn't my thing - I find it incredibly boring. Whereas I usually find environments inspiring.

So basically there's a change of plan to my FMP pipeline, and that's perfecting the character I've already made, then using him as a third person player in a full fledged environment. I was put off, until I managed to get it working...
(note that everything you see is placeholder esp. animations (minus the Idle are just edited motion capture files I did in Max, Id rather try traditional)

Idle (player start point) A pretty basic stand still motion, but needs work

Running away - Another consideration; Facial Rigging in UDK
otherwise he'll have that permanent derp face

Jumping!

Needless to say I think I'll enjoy the revised project, but don't worry, if I plan my time accordingly I can actually fulfill the 3D character side of my brief by completing it after the environment. But I'm going to solely focus on making something cool in UDK. Once I get Penguin rigged 'perfectly' I'm going to begin on the environment.

Anyway, going back to the Third Person setup I managed to figure out, there are a few things I need to tweak - which looks like more script. The camera controls the looking direction of Penguin, on a XY axis, which in a way is okay but the camera feels very rigid. You can rotate it up and down, but ideally I want it to be able to orbit Penguin without him moving with the camera. The second thing I need to tweak is the movement backwards, because upon release of 'S' or back, or whatever, Penguin snaps back to face forwards (the 'Idle' animation which is facing in the X direction). My theory is that I can plug in some extra nodes into the Animtree to work around this, its just probably going to be a bit of trial and error.

Character Reveal! - Baron Von Polar

So initially Penguin's nemesis was going to be the Walrus-type character, but after being told it wasn't intimidating enough, he's been demoted to a regular boss rather than the big fish - and his replacement is here ; Baron Von Polar. (I think a Polar Bear is much scarier than a Walrus). Here's some concept sketches of what I've come up with thus far, but there's always room for critique while this is still in the development stage.

Penguin WIP

So the first character I'd do had to be Penguin (just note, that I keep calling him Penguin cause I cant craft a suitable name for him yet...until that day comes, ill stick with the most original thing I can call him...) I approached the character differently, in respect to the aviator by zsculpting then retopologizing. I used a rough base mesh, but found that doing things in segments works a lot better, then mashing normals/ diffuse UVs into their respective texture sheets.

The stage above took roughly two days to get to, zbrushing on the first day then retopologizing/baking normals on the next. He's roughly around 3.5k triangles...which isn't bad!
    I'm gonna jump forward a few days to show the progress since (this is turning into Art Attack - here's one I did earlier), which is basically making the backpack, the mallet and 90% completion of the diffuse.

This is a Max view port screen print, not a render, with consistent colours enabled.
It's this type of flat cel-shading I'm going to try and achieve in UDK, hopefully.

 And this is basically what I need to do next. I've got most of the animation side of things sussed out, rigging/eye movement, but I'm wondering if its possible to switch out the texture of his eyes to say a 'closed eyelid' text for example - and if this texture swapping can be used on individual material ID's because at the moment the eyes and the body are one mesh, with 3 material IDs + 1 for the mallet. Time to do some more research.

Aviator

I've been so secretive about this project, so I'm just gonna drop this here.

When I get the time I'll write up some background stuff.