Tesla & Stage Lighting

This is probably the most “character” models I’ve done in a long time. Moreso, it’s definitely the most DRAWING I’ve done in a long time. Full disclosure, this sketch had to go through a ton of plastic surgery in the form of the puppet warp tool in PS to get to the stage in the screencap on the left. I don’t even feel comfortable posting the original sketch. I could probably up the quality a lot by using a scanner instead of my phone’s camera, but I figure that the characters will be so small on screen anyway that it won’t matter too much. Once I fixed the outlines, I just painted under them in PS and used the same technique for the model as I did for The Housekeeper.

Once I had the model in-game, I started working on a couple theater features. The first was tweaking the lighting so that it dimmed when mousing over a character. I felt like this helped create the stage atmosphere by giving each character their own monologue lighting. I really like UDK’s matinee system, I can get a lot done with it really quickly.

After setting up the lighting, I remembered that my character classes were cast from the kactor system. Just as a quick test, I wanted to see if a matinee animation would work with one of the characters, so I grabbed Tesla and gave him a quick animation. I’m actually pretty happy with how this is coming along now.

Now if I can just settle on a story.