Micronoid research

I was told by a few people that some good research for the Micronoid is that of the 'Phazon' from Metroid. the problem is, I have never played or seen any metroid game (althoguh I have heard of them) so it doesn't really help in finding them. But these pictures are the closest things to these 'Phazons', or its ingame cousins, found on the internet.

If I come back to remake the Micronoid I can definately use some of these to help me for inspiration. Of course not all help, like the bug, which is completely different, althgouh I do like the see through look which is what I had hoped to learn for it before.

The other ones with their electric look are great for research for the micronoid, yet it still needs a more organic look, which will be the tricky part. (looking both electric and orgainc) So it will be very difficult.

I wouldn't use the ice type one either because it is far too different copared to teh original. The icronoid is meant to be blood inside all the aliens in Xcom. But on its own it moves around like liquid and uses psychic abilities to hurt or take over people. This is probably why the electric look was put on it.

Micronoid

These are pictures of my newest character from Xcom apocalypse. The modelling for it is simple enough but the harder part is the texturing of it.

The first was my first attempt at texturing it and the second obviously different.

I made the purple and orange colours less obtrusive and quite miniscule in comparison to the first. I think this is better although I'm still not happy with it.I also changed the model slightly so it looks like it's whirling around. I think this makes the texture better but still is far from perfect.

Here is the reference from which I am working from.

Of course they will look different but I hoped for mine to look better than how it does. I still don't know too much about texturing though and i really wanted the micronoid to be shiny and transparent, maybe glittery but am unsure how at the moment., but I will have to leave it as it is for the moment. As I will now be spending time on posing the skeletoid.

Quick test pose

Thought I'd test the Skeletoid's rig quickly. It is only to test prior to proper posing, and because of this no weighting has been altered.

Rigging

As you can see I have completely rigged my character. This was quite hard to learn, but once you've learnt it once it is pretty simple to do again on other characters.

The rig consists of a normal set of bones and joints for basic humanoid actions. The hand and feet can also bend in the same way apart from the pincers of course, which are made to bend slightly into a closed position.

These are all controlled by set driven keys located activated on circles and some attached via locators. The middle circles are used to bend the character or twist appropriately.

Although not all of these are required for this project, or even for in a game, I thought they were best to be done anyway, just for good practice. And one set I DIDN'T do which I could have was to move the mouth. This was because I didn't see it as necessary for the character. Looking at the reference from before it doesn't seem like it is a proper neck, but more of a tube so my interpretation of it is that it can't really move it's mouth, but I may decide differently later on and can always come back to it.

Finished veins and extra armpits

I have finished the 3D veins but a I said before this adds way too many polygons and is basically pointless, but I wanted to finish it anyway just to see what it looks like. I really like it to be honest but of course wouldn't be put in game because of this polygon count issue. (over 10,000 poly). I suppose for cut sequences this wouldn't be too bad to use as polycount is really irrelevant as the sequences will be pre-rendered when in game (or at least they can be).

Other than veins I have also fixed up the armpits. Originally I hadn't left enough (if any) faces underneath the armpit. This would be hell if I wanted to animate it or even for poses as the entire body would be stretching. As said I have fixed this by adding in some faces. To do this I had to split some vertices open and remake and reattach them accordingly.

Back to the Anthropod

As I've done quite a lot to the skeletoid, and as it is it's pretty finished, I thought I'd come back to the Anthropod to create some 3 veins which I wanted to do before. the reason I didn't though was for organisational purposes.. as in.. I only wanted to come back to do extra tweaks like this when all the basics are finished first.

So here is a half done version of the veins.

I think it looks really kool but the way I did it meant that the poly count went WAAAaaay up. The following image shows why.

As you can see considering it isn't that much of a noticeable vein, the poly count is stupidly high and unnecessary. I did them by creating the veins as separate objects and using booleans to create a union between the two objects. This means that the objects are combined as one, except it means vertexs aren't matched up and will cause many errors if left. Instead of trying to match vertexs and edges up individually I selected the entire thing and smoothed it. This automatically adds divisions the the entire model (which I was going to do anyway) but also properly attaches the new object that had been united to the model, as shown.

Texturing the eyes

And now is the time for texturing the eyes.

The first image I really like how my texture turned out. As you can see I made it resemble the eyes from the reference (unlike before) because the eyes on this creature are one of it's main features. And they look really great as they are. Being completely black with nothing but a slight shine to them really makes them look eerie.



The next i experimented a bit with them to see if they could be improved. I thought I'd do a larger 'shine' texture around the eyes but did the wrong side of the eyes. This kinda looks cool though, slightly like some sort of dogs eyes, but is not great for this character.



This final image shows off the final texture for the eyes with the whole body too, just to have a better idea of how the character is looking so far.