Venturer Adventure

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1

Hey all,

I am brand spankin’ new to the forums and just wanted to create a post for a project I am putting together. I have been kicking this concept around for years now and finally starting to move forward on it. Orginally it was a 2D side scrolling beat em up much like castle crashers, but now it has shifted to a straight up platformer like mega man. Its going to be 3D yet maintain the locked camera from the side. I am the artist on the project working with one other programmer atm so its gonna be a slow process. Just thought I would toss up a few concepts I made ages ago along with the base mesh of the hero character I created the other night.

I plan to post progress on here to for feedback and to keep us moving along. Thanks.


Concepts of enemy variety.


Orginal screen setup


Concept of Hero and Current 3D mesh

2

Nice char design but unnecessary high poly count.
8 sided limbs + lots of polys on the face.
If you can, try to keep poly count under 1000, you’ll have better places to put the performance :wink:.

  • also textures can work wonders, if done well and help to get away with a lower poly model.

If you dont ever plant to show 20+ animated mobs on the screen, then just nice char design.

3

Don’t worry about the poly count. Under 1000? That must be a joke. The average GPU can handle millions of polygons without breaking a sweat.

4

Well, you still need to take into consideration the CPU cost of animating that geometry.

5

I n newer panda builds, there is support to turn on hardware accelerated animation, not sure which var in config.prc is that, but i think its there.

6

I left this character a bit dense since he is the playable character and there won’t be tons of him on the screen. He will have a rig with “stretchy” limbs/spine as well as a set of blend shapes for his face so I wanted to make sure there were enough polys to take these effects.

7

The comment above that config var says

# The new version of panda supports hardware vertex animation, but it's not quite ready

so I don’t think its such a good idea. But I agree that 1000 is still quite low.

8

Spent some time on the Zbrush sculpt for the hero’s normal map. Here is the progress from over the weekend.

9

very nice and funny art there.
my piece of suggestion is to animate and render all your characters in 3d from your 3D rigger and to put in panda as 2D cards pictures to keep maximum quality, without loosing even a pixel of beauty of your art, and also to have the higher framerate possible even with lazy PCs.

10

I would prefer to keep it 3D. I have been working in the mobile game industry for almost 5 years now with the vast majority of my work being done hand drawn 2D or 3D rendered sprites. I was trained in school for 3D and feel like I am falling behind on the tech being in mobile so long. So I am using this project to refine my 3D skills.

Astro

11

so this is your chance to make it different from the zillions of endless zombie rampage games around, not keeping “locked camera from the side” but instead offering some camera view variety :wink:

12

Cool project.
Nice graphics and interesting possibilities with 3d models in a sidescroller.

Are you after effects like seen in newer mario titles (mario wii, paper mario) and super smash bros?

13

New Super Mario Bros. on the Wii would be the best example of that batch. I like the their use of color and design. I am not aiming to be that “cute” though. Team Fortress 2 would be a good example of the saturated colors used with stylized graphics and cartoon violence I am looking to achieve.