Plan for Andy Schatz

Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa models are stampeding in!

Our modeler/texturer, who shall remain nameless, (ok, we'll name him... the Phantom Modeler!), is starting to finish up the low-poly animals for Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa! It's particularly fun to see these animals come in, considering that there will be hundreds of them roaming the plains and hillsides. Here's a sneak peek at a giraffe:



...and a lion...



The lion currently stands at lion at 650 according to ShowTool, and 510 according to Maya (not sure why this difference exists, I know there was a thread on it recently), but the lower LODs take it way down. The giraffe is at 700 according to ShowTool, around 550 according to Maya.

The look we were going for was exaggerated realism. The animals should be as realistic as possible while giving them a slightly exaggerated flare so that they are recognizable from a distance and so that they take on their own character without heading into the realm of fantasy.

I think its very difficult to develop a "signature" look. It takes time, iteration, and a lot of creative artists. The work shown above, hopefully is the first baby step in that direction (and also, by the way, was entirely the work of our genius phantom modeler).

*edit
Ah, by the way, we started by using the models off of an Animal Kingdom CD by Dedicated Digital. We were trying to increase our ability to work in tandem so our process was as follows:
-Tech artist builds a rig using the high-poly, realistic models from the Animal Kingdom CD.
-Animator begins animating
-Tech artist down-rezzed the high poly model wihtout care for quality so that we had something to use in-game
-Modeler started from scratch modeling and texturing to the dimensions of the rig
-Tech artist rebinds the new model to the rig and remaps the UVs using a script.

It has actually worked quite well. I was always taught that the animator couldn't really animate till he had a semi final model, but since we aren't doing anything that requires too much fine tuning and we aren't worried too much about inter-penetration of limbs, this parallel work model has turned out nicely.