Ornament Statue

Another small asset created for the game is this small statue. Much like the garden statue, however this time I started from a base-mesh in Maya as I would normally with characters because this seemed to give better results and Normal Maps in the end instead of having to project the ZBrush topology to the new low-res mesh as before, resulting in quality loss.

The result was an Adaptive Normal Map, creating much more accurate seams and data overall. Hopefully this will appear sharper in game as a result.

Assets

We have started creating low poly assets for the garden
and testing them in the engine

The level so far...

We have been hard at work beginning to populate the world with our assets. We are concentrating on the main functionality of the level at the moment and as such have been working on the basis of the building and garden.

An overview of the level so far

The boat jetty

Outdoor staircases

The 'angel' fountain

The entrance hall

The concept we are working from was created by Artur back in the early stages of design.

Guest characters inside the house

The beginnings of the grand hall

We have also been working on many more meshes that will be added to the level once the basics are in.

Guard progression

I have begun to model our 'enemy' character, the guard. He is designed in the style of a well known French actor Vincent Cassel. Their uniforms are based on research into Monaco guards and French police uniforms.

Finished boat

The boat is now finished and uv unwrapped ready for texturing and implementation

Garden Statue

This is the water fountain statue in the garden. It needed to be low-poly, but should have much detail. However this made the topology of the object hard to pin-point until we knew exactly how it would look in the end. To work around this, the model started out as a sculpt in ZBrush using ZSpheres, which was then retopologised in Maya, its deformation projected onto the new tolopology back in ZBrush, then a Normal Map extracted. This was then successfully applied to the in-game topology in Maya, and rendered out using Mental Ray.

These are the results:

The model needs the wings to be re-built for design purposes, and possibly new normal maps applied to the vase later on if we have time.