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Humanoid Creature Acn1020


Springheel

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Darkness Falls will be working on creating a creature to fill the roll of Craymen/Kurshok. That is, a mysterious humamoid race to populate deep out of the way caverns or pagan areas. I would prefer leaning more towards the craymen than the Kurshok.

 

DF, post any and all work related to this project in this thread, please.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Not sure if I know exactly what a Kurshok or Crayman looks like, but I recently played T1 a little and think I found one. This concept is loosely based on that guy I saw. Drawn completely from scratch without looking at anything, so I don't imagine there'd be any copyright issues unless I have a photographic memory and am an autistic savant in the closet :)

 

I was thinking the little green belly thing could be a weak point for arrows or something... (ensuring a one-shot kill). I'm not sure if the concept captures it very well, but since the guy has crab-like pincers, I was thinking his chest, shoulders, pincers, parts of his exoskeleton body and legs could be made of a hard shell-like material. I envision fleshy (or not as hard parts) around his rib-cage, biceps, neck, and possibly parts of his legs and feet.

 

Creature-DarknessFalls-s.jpg

 

Click here for larger version of same pic.

 

Note: I didn't work on the legs or feet much, so they lack detail. I can work on them later, if needed. I figure I should at least create some feet.

 

I envision him having a clicking sound of some sort, as his somewhat insect-like. I think this may be the sound the similar creatures in T1 had, but can't remember.

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Your artwork is really looking nice :)

 

Yeah, you have a photographic memory. That's practically the same pincer guy, but yours is grey, and has more detail. And less shell plating and more alien looking.

 

He's based on a crab, right? You should collect a whole bunch of crab pictures (and even info on what the body parts are for and how they work), and do your own take on a crab-human hybrid, noting what all the body parts of the crab are for, and try and think about how nature would evolve them to survive in a humanoid way. That is genearally how you come up with some "beleivable" and really unique stuff.

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Yes, that's really cool, but perhaps a little too alienlike, mainly because of the green stuff.

I'll own up and say I hated all the 'woo' in thief, and it mostly spolied my enjoyment of T1, but since the whole idea of this is to let FM authors make whatever they want, we have to include everything, complete with several kitchen sinks.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

character models site

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Not necessarily. I'm sure the FM community at large will be more than happy to build their own custom content. Much better to provide a solid set of IK bones and walk (etc.) animations that can be customised than multiple variations on everything. It is, aftar all a (sort of) fairly streight forward proposition to plonk a crayman model and skin on top of a zombie bone-set and call it a beasticle.

 

 

I hate to be the nay sayer (again) but we really should be concentrating on getting some basic characters in the Dooooom engine, getting them animated and ironing out all the problems as a priority. Hows about applying some thought to character animation and poses springheel and Darkness Falls. Something a bit like a story board (but for individual actions) that can be used a guide for key frames. How about giving some detail on the existing concepts. Or providing side and front views to make the modelling process that much easier....

 

Grrr. I really don't like making this point over and over because the concept art that you guys are producing is a treat. They really do look fantastic. But these are parallel tasks that can be taken up at pretty much any point. There are mission critical tasks that need addressing first.

 

 

err, yeah - anyway. what the other guys have said. The grey and green colours are a bit alien-eseque. Are these things blind/poor sighted or do they have big reflective eyes for seeing in the dark? Big crayfish tenticles would be cool for feeling your way around in the gloom. Spiders. I want Spiders.

Edited by jay pettitt
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I dunno, it's not that easy a task to model your own creature, make a texture, normal and spec map. I think we should eventually be looking to include all the creature types from the Thief games for FM autors to use.

For the moment though, yes, getting the core elements together for a level is what matters.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

character models site

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...

Grrr. I really don't like making this point over and over because the concept art that you guys are producing is a treat. They really do look fantastic. But these are parallel tasks that can be taken up at pretty much any point. There are mission critical tasks that need addressing first.

...

True, but our concept artists are just that. They can't program. They may as well keep concept-artisting. No harm done. In fact, it'll help us all keep in theme. Concept art sets the theme.

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Or providing side and front views to make the modelling process that much easier....

 

These are available to any modeller that wants them (Deep Omega already has them for the Thief character). ODDity likes some extra room to be creative and really doesn't seem to need them.

 

If an animator wants some in-motion concept sketches, all they have to do is ask. I know nothing about animation, so I have no idea what would be useful.

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I see the points. I made him grayish brown cuz I didn't think something living in the ground would have much pigment in it skin. Have adjusted some colors:

 

Creature-DarknessFalls-bl.jpg

 

I'm also not a fan of 'woo,' but my assignment was to create a creature to give variety to FM builders.

 

He's not based on a crab... just has pincers. He's based on the character roaming around in the caves of T1.

 

PS - Please send me a picture of a Crayman. I guess I don't know what they look like.

Edited by Darkness_Falls
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We want the creatures to look believable, which means they should be based on something with real-world anatomy. Belchers are based to some degree on lizard (dinosaur) anatomy. The Kurshok were based on fishy anatomy. We should do the same for these. They can be a mix and match of references, but I would suggest thinking insectoid or crustacean.

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:blink: With pincers, doesn't my creature have crustracean influence; and with buggy eyes, insectoid influence? I see real world anatomy all over this thing - legs, chest, head, arms, eyes, mouth, etc... thus, 'human'-oid, as requested. Oh well, I guess my downfall was looking at Thief I to try and figure out what a Crayman or Kurshok was.

 

PS: Perhaps I should submit him to the Halo group to see if they want to use him in Halo 3 :D

Edited by Darkness_Falls
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I think that your body-type would be fine, but personally i never found the craymen all that interesting, simply because the way that they are doesn't work. Why would a creature like that walk fully upright?

 

Bah. I'm probably just getting too much into it :lol:

http://www.thirdfilms. com

A Thief's Path trailer is now on Youtube!

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I'm with you. Let's not have creatures like this or any other insectoid/crustracean/lizardly variety. I also didn't find them very fun or entertaining in the games. I often see them as just guards with a different skin on them, unless their abilities or traits are very different.

 

I mainly like the realistic thieiving experiences against guards more than anything else. The occasional pop-up ghost was very cool too, imo, and often scared the heck out of me... especially when I wasn't expecting it.

 

Some 'woo' is okay, if done well... but I get zombied out after a while.

 

Burricks are okay, and real animals like crows, bats, and bugs are okay... but not bi-pedal humanoid creatures. Seeing as how people don't want humanoid creatures, I'd rather focus my attention on something other than this. Can ACN1020 be deleted from the project plan?

Edited by Darkness_Falls
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I think that humanoid monsters are fairly well entrenched in the game. We can no more get rid of them than we can robots.

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The only thing I truly consider woo are the ghosts, undead...stuff like that. That being said, it has been established that some very strange things exist in the fictional Thief world.

 

As long as it's not earth and exists on some other plane of reality, then I think we should be ok with the creatures and undead....within reason. We don't want an all out Woostock on our hands.

 

Jimmy Hendrix, back from the head? YIKES!!!

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There are mission critical tasks that need addressing first.

As a concept artist, what's more critical for me than to create concept art? I can't yet model stuff in CGI because I don't have that experience.

 

Spiders. I want Spiders.

Spiders? you can't have spiders. You can't handle the spiders. HA, LOL, I bet there'll be spiders some day.

 

Much better to provide a solid set of IK bones and walk (etc.) animations that can be customised than multiple variations on everything.

I'm not an animator or programmer, but aren't there already a multitude of resources available to do this? Seems like the skeletal framework of many creatures probably already exists in the Doom 3 SDK if not on the web? 3-D Studio Max has skeletons for a few things already pre-loaded.

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I'm with you. Let's not have creatures like this or any other insectoid/crustracean/lizardly variety. I also didn't find them very fun or entertaining in the games

 

If that's how you feel about it, why the heck did you ask to do the concept art for them?? :P

 

 

Here's a screenshot:

 

crayman.jpg

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Heh. I never said we shouldn't include them, just that i never really liked them. (other than the sound they made the first time i cam across one, then i realize that they're easier to take out than a burrick, and they lost much of the appeal.)

 

I still think the bipedal "creatures" that were best executed were the golems in T3

http://www.thirdfilms. com

A Thief's Path trailer is now on Youtube!

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Hmm, I felt the golems could've been much better. I didn't like them that much. They just seemed like guards with cement poured over them :) Not as big and intimidating as they could've/should've been for my tastes. They didn't really look like stone either.

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