Guy.brush

hoho Woodtick is still far far off in the realm of the impossible. Doing the whole of Woodtick would be insane for me alone. No freetime for the next year haha, especially cause there seems to exist no concept art for it. I just now saw that the mast for Wallys ship stil exists and reaches into the water... Thanks for the sketch trilobyte! Doing Wally interior is no problem, doing exterior mock-up might be feasible, but it will be a rough estimation. If I'd want to really redo the game I would constrain the camera to roughly the same angles (with some leeway left and right, up down) so modelling only the interior and not concentrating on a good looking exterior would be enough...

So I need expert's help on two items. I looked at Wally's and sadly there is no picture of the tilted shiphouse from outside that is readable enough to correctly model it. The interior is no problem but outside? If you look long enough at the Woodtick panorama there seems to be a structural bridge thing where the door is going in but it's not very readable. Another question: Theoretically, if you would do a Giant Monkey head, which version would you choose? The original Purcell sketch? http://home.comcast.net/~ervind/monkhead.html Or a mixture? To bad that the concept art for this is not the same angle as the original game screen. I'm just curious about people's opinions about the two things.

hmm don't think it will make a difference by now. Lot's of top level sites have reported about it and linked directly to the site. I just don't want Internet Rumor Mill to take over and people bitch that LucasArts forced it or anything. It's down due to the very real fear that my provider will call in the Russians to collect the bill

haha my site needed to be taken down for now. over 1000GB traffic yesterday. So if anyone asks, tell them it was not any official C&D or something, it was a precaution so that I'm no going broke over this.

well I think you have to separate the character stuff from the environments. Just like you can have Monkey 2 backgrounds bundled together with Crysis trees and water without being too much of a stylistic mess, you could have less detailed/cartoony behaving characters in more detailed environments. Pretty much every cartoon has the backgrounds drawn with more detail cause it's easy to beautify one screen as opposed to whole animation cycles.

Well the first one wasn't totally set in stone when it came to style. Some of the screens looked more "realistic" than others. The second one had slightly more exaggerated architecture and environments but my guess is that this was more due to the artists freedom of finally being able to actually draw free lines and brushstrokes on paper and then scan the artwork. The 3rd one had an even more exaggerated tone but still had lots of detail and light in most of the screens. The slightly more cartoony nature of the 3rd one was partly due to production limitations and workload considerations. Bill Tiller said this himself once. It's just way easier to animate simpler characters with clean shapes and outlines than let's say a Guybrush with a cloak like the one in MI2. Then came the 4th one, with 3d tech being very limited in terms of lighting, shadows, polygon count and animation tools. So they followed the path towards a more cartoony and less detailed graphical style. You could say that my silly little experiment is a window into an alternate timeline (or obsessive fan brain;). One in which Monkey4 would've looked more like LeChuck's Revenge, cause 3d technology was already mature enough and ready to enhance the moody undertones in Monkey2. It's basically my try at a "Batman Begins" after "Batman & Robin" , though that might sound a tad arrogant hehe. Hmm...actually I still like the 89 Keaton Batman best..hmm...well flawed analogy.

I hope that video doesn't give off the impression that my vision of Monkey2 in 3D is a first-person shooter with Nanosuit Guy as Next-Gen Guybrush. I just didn't have a 3d Guybrush readily available and just ran around in Crysis mode. Of course it should be 3rd person! If I find the time I might do some camera mockup to try fixed camera angles that can move silghtly when the player moves to the left or the right. But it doesn't make sense when your player model is Nomad.

Ok here it is. I think it deserves it's own thread, cause the old "Special Edition" one got pretty crowded. I refined the 3d models of the Mix'n Mojo and Captain Dread's ship a little more (the ones I got by projecting the original concept art onto 3d geometry). For traditional real-time usage a proper UV texture layout was needed but after that it was very easy to get them into Cryengine. With all the shaders in place, some little normal mapping, HDR, cloud shadows and other fancy pants high-tech stuff the rendering quality easily surpasses the one from Maya, and it's real-time! The environment around the sets is just there to enhance the feeling of the place a little bit and have a nice little Caribbean island night atmosphere. The original Voodooshack interior is impossible to get into an exterior that would look like the skull one in the original game. That is one of the advantages of 2d, you aren't restricted by stuff like this. In 3d you need to find other solutions. So I just put it into a rough tent and stuck it into the swamp. Building the whole exterior with the skull and the jaw elevator would've been a little too much work for the limited free time I have right now Also the voodoo swamp is basically a mixture of the scabb island graveyard and the original swamp. It was just a mockup to have a nice surrounding environment for the Mix'n Mojo. I used existing assets for the twisted trees and the graves. I might release the "level" I built as a mod download in the future. I would still need to fix some little bugs so stay tuned for this. It's called "Chicken Crysis on Monkey island" and features some basic gameplay. You need to unleash Pollo El Diablo by feeding it Voodoobananas... Oh and please try to ignore the fact that you play as Nomad from Crysis...I didn't have a cartoony character model readily available

make sure you include something Caribbean like, like a steel pan drum.

An abomination?

Just a quick update. The Voodooshack and Captain Dread's ship are inside Cryengine 2 right now...feels awesome to run around in them. When I've time I build some environments around them and I can show it to you or release it as a test level. Real-time ocean waves ftw \ Sadly there is no character model even closely resembling Guybrush. oh well...

I would totally ditch Elaine for your Kate

Come on Irishsmile, smile! I may have 133t environment and 3d skillz, but I'm not half the character artist that you are.

hmmm...doesn't look too shabby...maybe you could do cam projection modelling with MI1 too afterall ! well if all fails, this will be my hobby for life, doing one background after another hehe.