ICE Team project: George the treebeast
This is George. He was my main test character at Naughty Dog for all experiments while on the ICE Team. These are the stills of the head that was created in Maya, then sculpted and textured in zBrush. The premise of George was that he's a very old, and large (30ft tall) creature, that lives in the forest. The sapplings and large vines are growing on him due to seads dropping on him and starting to grow due to his age and living conditions. He was used as a complex test bed for techniques, and was never intended to be used in any naughty dog game. I was responsible for sculpting, texturing, rigging, physics, animation, shaders, and Progressive Meshing technologies.
Turntable view generated in zBrush. The compression washed out some of the texture colors.
test rigging & animations created during the PS3 engine development.
George walk test with all of the splineIK, hair based, dynamic feathers and sapplings running.
George walk test with all of the splineIK, hair based, dynamic sapplings running.
The sapplings were splineIK based, then the curve was converted into a Maya hair object to create the physics movements. I then created blendshapes on the curves so they could be hand animated to grow or shrink, and could be used convey emotions. All of this worked together to create a very realistic, and controlable set of physics.