Technical Summary
The first iteration of the cliffs were intended to surround the main area in a couple of sections and have a low polygon count to save on performance. This iteration would have also been difficult to implement and have the desired effect on the player
Technical Summary
The second iteration of the cliffs were designed to be used as blueprints so that the programming team could build the cliffs in engine and vertically. This would ensure that the cliffs would give the effect and that the level design team wanted them to have on the player and that there would be suitable variation within the designs.
Technical Summary
The third iteration of the cliffs were still designed to be blue prints however previous iterations weren't jagged enough so I used the transform tool to randomly extrude vertices to make them jagged
Technical Summary
Ultimately the modular pieces made in Maya shown above did not fit the games style and were unusable for a variety of reasons. The change to make them in ZBrush was made due to the fact that Zbrush had a wider variety of tools to create realistic cliff sections. Another change made with the final versions was to make them vertically instead of as modular pieces. This had a better fit on how the level had been grey boxed as it was originally just vertical boxes in unreal engine. The top of each of the cliff faces was the main focal point of the model as the silhouette would be seen by the player while they played the game.
High Polygon Sculpt of Head Isometric
High Polygon Sculpt of Head Front on
Keeping the enemy model unsmoothed when implementing it into the game was a technical choice to maintain consistency with the narrative. Originally the enemy was an undead creature with both skeletal and flesh elements that had been reanimated to haunt the player and its origin was unclear. After a change to the narrative to include that the enemy was an manifestation of the players guilt about leaving one of their friends to die in a rockslide the rocky and jagged segments of the unsmoothed model made sense. Before this decision was made within the team, I had made a high polygon sculpt of the head and body and that included a brain and more detail within the top of the jaw. These sculpts never made it into the final project due to the time constrains and narrative decisions.