Bringing our natives into our Stonepunk game!

In this Antegods development update, also posted on Imgur, our Artist in residence Tom talks us through his process of taking one of the Antegods characters from the page of a Comic and bringing him to life in a walking, talking and oddly falling 3D model for use in the game.  

People who’ve been following Antegods know that next to the game, we’re also building an entire universe. A complete background story to explain the Antegods. We had Niels ‘t Hooft and Robin Keijzer create a comic to tell our story! We posted a great interview with them on our Blog. 

The comic tells the story of 4 young Mayans living on earth. They’re attacked by the Spaniards and forced to flee their homes. After a wild series of events they end up in the Antegods intergalactic tournament. The four characters are all very different and have their own drives, characteristics and beliefs.

Meet Gabor, one of the 2 guys.

Gabor is the brother of one of the other characters and has always had unique challenges as a child. He lives in his own world and is often troubled with visions and hallucinations. But when they encounter this entire new world, it seems Gabor knows more about this than anyone else. He knows how to control the huge mech statues that are used to fight in the intergalactic tournament.

While developing Antegods we got some comments saying that Antegods lacks personality. The statues are shaped after animals, but it’s hard to relate to them or put them in perspective. Therefore we decided to create a 3D version of Gabor and put this in the game. Luckily I love creating characters 😉

There is a huge difference between creating a Stone statue and a human character. Therefore I first created a sculpt of the face. I wanted this to be smooth and representative of the comic, but also somewhat realistic and not too cartoony. This sculpt convinced everyone in the team as they loved the visual style.

I opened his mouth in the sculpted version because I wanted him to be able to have facial expressions. I used Topogun to create low poly versions of every highpoly object I create.

Not to forget the eyes, earrings and teeth 😉

Using a very clean bake and some clean colors I managed to get this version in Unity.

From here on I started with the body. First trying to get a rough setup of his proportions, while keeping in mind that it must not be too cartoony and also not too realistic. 

 With this basic shape I started to sculpt the individual assets of the body.

Because this is a tryout I did not put much attention into the tiny details or an efficient pipeline. As the highpoly versions of his body are done, I topogunned them to create lowpoly versions.

Then I modeled and sculpted accessories like the cloth, bracelets and necklace.

Placing everything in Unity the character started to take shape.

Especially with his clothes.

Now that the character is created, we needed to animate it. For the face I made a very simple facial rig that only moved the lower jaw and the eyelids. For the body we use a website called Mixamo. This website has an auto rigger function and gives access to loads of motion captured animations.

And there you have it. Gabor in motion! Downloading some animations and putting this in Unity gave us this result:

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed this tiny insight of this little sidequest in the Antegods development. Feel free to jump on discord and chat to us about anything! http://discord.codeglue.com

Social media

If you enjoyed this blog post, and are interested in chatting with us more or participating on Twitch.tv then don’t hesitate to jump on Discord and chat to us.

To follow our development updates, please check us out on Tumblr, Twitter or Facebook. And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for info on events and sales.

Antegods is supported by the Dutch Cultural Media Fund, Cultural Industries Fund NL and the MEDIA Programme of the European Union.