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What would you do if you were friends with the gods, and your influence on them could change the cosmos? Mythic Ocean is an atmospheric and charming adventure where you'll befriend a pantheon of gods under the sea, help solve their problems, and make choices that shape the birth of a new world. Now Available on PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4 and XBOX. |
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Early concept sketches of one of the cast of Gods: Amar. First imagined as a trickster god archetype we wanted something both playful and a bit mischievous. I thought a otter was perfect for this, but also wanted to find a way to blend together something familiar with the sublime. This led to the extra appendages, markings and third eye.
UV mapped in Blender with textures painted in Photoshop.
In game screen shot
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After creating a turn around model sheet I uploaded the image as a background in Blender and began modeling Amar. I modeled all the main cast with primitives to make limited poly models, rather than sculpting and retopography, as we wanted to be able to have the game run optimally on older machines and lower resolution consoles.
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Blender's built in rigify was limited at the time, but a good base to construct a completely custom rig. I used the spine and arms from the biped preset with modifications to the pelvis and neck. I created additions to the rig from scratch for the tail, legs and face. Unreal had difficulty importing splines and IK systems from Blender, so I developed a "shadow rig system" that utilized FK bones that would copy the position, rotation and size of any IK features. When imported into Unreal, the engine would properly read the animation attached to these bones. I also collaborated with our programmer to partially automate this process, saving a lot of time on the tedium of copy/paste.
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Alethea is showing off the 3D development process. First I modeled Alethea in Blender, done in quads to optimize for animation and using primitives to lower poly count. Next I UV mapped her in Blender by marking seams and then hand packing islands with a size and orientation order that would make it easy to interpret and texture in Photoshop.
Finally the rig utilizes a human biped base for her head, chest, arms and torso, a custom IK leg for the back and brim of her dress, IK/FK handles for the sides and part on her dress, a facial rig from scratch, an FK rig from scratch for her headress and a unique rig from scratch for her goggles that utilizes blend shapes to make her expressive eyes. |
I designed, modeled, textured, rigged, and animated every creature and character in Mythic Ocean, with a few exceptions where I worked together with our designer and programmer. Here I trained them on my process, providing written directions and examples when I couldn't collaborate with them directly, then gave feedback and made any needed adjustments to successfully import the characters into Unreal.
While the majority of characters were rigged, to enhance performance and save time many fish use vertex paint and particle systems for animation. This was also a collaborative process- myself and the programmer worked on a shader in Unreal to get the fish a wiggling. |
