Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Phantom Assassin

So this was a fun little project that a coworker and friend of mine was working one.  He entered the Polycount DOTA 2 competition but had some trouble coming up with good designs, so he asked me to help him out.

We went through a lot of iteration with this and a lot of work thrown out since it either collided or collapsed when put on the Phantom Assassins rig, or the model was to complex to work with the relatively low specs.

Since at work everything we do is low poly my buddy was a bit rusty on Z-brush and we actually ended up missing the deadline so the model was never finished.  I still like some of the stuff that came out of this so I figured I'd post it.

This was a Wallpaper I did at the very end that we where going to use as our presentation piece on the steam store.


These where the first sets of concepts.  My buddy ended up liking 1. so I made a couple more iterations on it but we pretty much just stuck with the original idea but with a longer beak (7).



I made an orthographic view of it and used it as an opportunity to stylize the helmet and feathers more.  Also got the colors to match the original armor a bit more closely.


My buddy was struggling with getting the shapes to translate into 3D nicely (that happens a lot in my experience) so I made a couple of images of what the major plains might look like.



After a day or so of modeling the real problems started up.  The feathers where just too complex of a silhouette and where collapsing whenever the Phantom Assassin did her twirl attack.  So a lot more Work was done on getting the shoulders to work.



Finally my buddy just made a rough model that had not collision issues, drew a rough version of it and I painted it up a bit.


Somewhere in between there we worked on the weapons and some cape ideas.





I did a quick paint over of the models that where done.  There where some minor changes to keep the poly budget down but other than that most of the stuff that was made stayed fairly faithful to the concept.


This was around the time were everything fell apart.  I still finished our "sales" image since I liked were is was going.  I made some minor changes to the PA's chest armor, boots, and gloves, since in the actual models they're just tubes with scribbles on them, hopefully Valve wont hold that against me.