I have been making a lot of progress on the Tiki-totem. With the original totem concept art, the team at Darkwind was having some uncertainty with the color they received from the artist. The totem was very dark and would prove very hard to see in a small, game environment. It was put upon me to recolor the totem to what a felt fit the game, and also would be easily visible and recognizable. I planned to combine the newer concept art with some of the earlier designs from the game, while keeping it clean and understandable.
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| My re-imagined version of the Tiki-Totem Concept art. |
With the coloring aspect of the Totem, I ended up lightening a lot of areas while adding the stone texture from other parts of the Blocks game. Adding accents to the face and using colors from the Tiki-man helped greatly.
From here I proceeded to sculpt the model in mudbox. I kept the model in separate chunks and simply repeated them 4 times around. The normals were not as intense as the tiki-man's making the coloring very important. Again using the normals as a template, I colored the textures in photoshop.
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| The Tiki-Totem Textured and normaled. |
The model came out well and the Darkwind team seems pleased. It will be shorter than the Tiki-Man in game, and will likely light up when the Block is delivered to the island. I'll be using the higher resolution texture and normal map when I get a chance create a glamor shot of the Tiki-man and his totem together on an island.
