All Work and No Play... (RFA Part 3)

Wow, what a long month! It seems like an age since I last posted, though it was only 19 days ago. Madness! (No, Sparta!). It's been a strange month too; usually I fill maybe 5 pages or so of my sketchbook and then condense that down to share the best and the worst with you lot (all three of you). This month - 13 pages. 13! Madness! (No, increasingly annoying tendency to shout Sparta!). But I can go on about that more next time. This time It's the grand finale of the work I'm going to share with you from Red Faction: Armageddon.

So this will actually be a pretty short entry - there are only three of my pieces left to show, and they all have the distinction of being cut from the game. Actually they do appear, but not in the condition I made them - they were changed from vehicles (which use a special vehicle system), to environment props (which use a different system) and have to be optimized for use as such. My friend Angela did the conversion from vehicles to props, so I can't take full credit for what's actually in the game. Yeah, yeah, I get it, you just want to see pictures. OK, here's a few (Click em to make me embigerize)...

Civilian Transport (C-Tran) #1 "Grub"
Art Directed by Chad Greene & Susan Cenci. Concept by Steve Holt

Don't you love that name. Why "Grub"? Well, the arm rests with the headlights look like grubs, at least to me. I've only got the game engine renders of this one for some reason. I did have some nice renders of the high-poly mesh too, but I appear to have lost them (In case you'd forgotten, or I never got around to mentioning, this is for a technique where you model or sculpt a very high detail model and then a low detail version of the same - you then create a 'normal map' texture from the differences between the two models and apply that to the low detail version which makes it appear very similar to the high detail version. Yes, it hurts my head too, and I do it on a regular basis).

This had the triple distinction of being my first vehicle made for the game, my first ever high-poly model and also it was the first vehicle to be cut. Wheee!

Not much more to say about it - it did appear clearly in the game, but only the rear of it, and it was in bright orange rather than blue - it's the truck Kara is loading when Darius gets useful with the lightning gun.

Civilian Bulldozer "Frog"
Art Directed by Chad Greene & Susan Cenci. Concept by Steve Holt

Why "Frog"? Because it looks like a really happy one. No, really, seen from the right angle it looks so much like one that I traced a picture of it, painted the resulting line-art green and stuck it inside as a Frog decal (you can sort of see it in the thumbnail to this very post. Don't look to hard for it because once you've seen it you can't unsee it, and that would be sad.

I was really pleased with this one, and pretty sad it got cut, but other than that, not much to say. You can see it in the game when you first descend into the pit in the Mining Exo right near the start of the game. It appears elsewhere, but that's the most obvious place.

Red Faction Battle Tank
Art Directed by Chad Greene & Susan Cenci. From a concept by Wingking

If the tank ever had a name I'm afraid I've forgotten it. The poor thing was cut almost as soon as I finished it, so I didn't spend any time thinking up a name for it. It should have been called the "Tarantula," since all the vehicles were named for wildlife, and this has a big spider type shape to it. Again these screenshots are all I have available; and the treads are missing - sorry; they look pretty cool when it has them.

It looks very similar to the original concept (Which I don't have to show you), except I made it a little more practical for the sort of terrain it could be navigating and redesigned the turret so it could actually rotate (The original concept was that the whole tank would rotate, which didn't seem to serve any need since all the stuff needed to have a fully functioning tank was already available).

I didn't like it when I was building it, but I do in retrospect - it's an interesting mashup of Tron and Batmobile styling.

It appeared as being under repair in the actual game, and then you got to drive it in the downloadable content; something I only realized today as somehow I missed that it had been released back in August (it may have been while I was away, which would explain my missing it).

And that's it. I have other, older games I can cover if I get around to it, and we have a new game coming out on November 15th; you may have heard of it - Saints Row the Third? I only did two vehicles for it, but I also did some ships... We'll get to that eventually no doubt.