Knighttime Adventures - Graduation project

zicoV

Hey guys,

My college graduation project just kicked off and I want to share my work over the next 4 weeks with you.

So the project I chose was to make a cinematic intro trailer to a game called "Knighttime Adventures". You might be thinking whats that ?
Well it's a game developed by game design students for their exam a few months ago and my girlfriend happened to be a part of this team so I got permission to make my project about this

The story of the game that my trailer is going to tell is this:

Jacob, a 5 year old boy with a wild imagination, wakes up one night to find his favored teddy bear Theo ripped to pieces, with everything but his head missing. He finds a trail of his bears stuffing leading down to the basement that he follows and thus the game begins.

The mechanics of the game is that he is imagining all these enemy's with everything from lava lamp dragons to paint bucket warriors, and also himself as a knight to combat his enemy's. This needs to be shown in the trailer.

Here's some concept from the game (Not made my me)

The boy Jacob:


His teddy Theo:



For this project I have to model, texture, rig and animate these 2 characters and make the enviroments I'll be using in the scenes, and with only 4 weeks it will be a fun challenge.

So let's do this

zicoV

Got started on the modeling with The boy and his bear.

Here are the models so far. I realize they need some work but I dont have alot of time to polish other than tonight and maybe a little tomorrow.




I realized i havnt talked about the style im going for yet.

I'm going to make simple hand painted textures for pretty much the entire thing and some simple lighting to give it a stylished cartoony feel. Havnt had much experience with this sort of thing in 3ds max though so if you know any good tuts or ways to achieve this let me know

And of course crit is very welcome

Baddcog

Zero Gear is a good example of good cartoony lighting imo. (Ogre Engine)

Basically it was just full bright, but they used vert painting for lighting info.
The inside of caves painted darker, light crystals inside the cave were painted white or light blue and so was the ground around them.
It made it look lit but in fact it actually wasn't.

Also a great was to use tiling textures for huge surfaces but get rid of the appearance of tiling. (Same effect with engines that bake in lighting info- ie: Hammer - TF2)

zicoV

Just got started on the textures for my main character. If anyone has some good tips on hand painting cloth textures i'm all ears

I got the enviroment modelled up too and i'll post some shots of them later on.

MeintevdS

I think the bottle shaped body works fine in 2D but will look odd in 3D. Even in the 3/4th shots it already looks a bit strange. I think it's fine if it's in the front view, but for the side view I think you should have some sort of curve/form in his body. Just the tapered shape is not enough.
Personally I'd also try to get at least a bit of shoulders in there or it'll look really odd when they are deformed later on in the process.

As for the face, in the concept they eyeballs are right in the middle of the face which I think personally looks way better than what the 3D model has right now. So I think moving them down the face a bit might be a good idea here, kids always show a lot of forehead and I think you character is missing this and it makes him look older and less cute.

Keep it up!