Reimagining Aliens

[p0ss]

 Just for fun I've been playing around doing retextures of the aliens, I thought I'd make a thread out of it so that people could provide feedback as I'm working on them. Keep in mind, I've done about ten skins for each of these, so some ideas may be present in one place but not another.  If these don't make it into the main game, I might turn them into a mod


Bloodspider:
original:


 For something with "blood" in its name, this thing looks pretty clean and sleek, bright almost. So the first thing I did was darken it up a bit, and add some blemishes to the metal, to make it look battle hardened.  I have a few variations on this theme but essentially they look like this


 then I worked on making it a bit bloodier, particularly the legs, which I can only imagine are likely to have ripped a civilian's guts out recently.  I guess it might even be possible to have them looking all clean until they've killed someone, then bust out the bloody skin.



Ortnok:
original:


When I encountered these guys in game for the first time I thought of them as scary, they are big and tough and mean looking. Problem being, currently their light green skin looks almost festive, its hard to be scared of something so bright and visible. So when I started working on them, the first thing I did was to add some more veins, cover them in scales,  and darken the skin a bit, which really made them look more snakelike and creepy.  I've also increased the resolution of the head substantially and brought out a lot of the details which weren't very clear at a lower resolution.  


 Once I'd done that, I did the same thing I had done for the bloodspider, these bastards have just been out butchering humans with their giant swords, they would be covered in blood. So I made one that looked like it had been through a battle or two.


Taman:
 I like the traditional alien feel of these guys, the big head and eyes.  thing is, as it stands they are almost comical, with their bright red coats, glowing yellow eyes and symbols and their lime green space ships.  So I decided to take a darker, more high tech line with these guys. I decided to take their skin colour as an inspiration for their colour pallete, a pale blue, which goes really well with purple, pink, aqua and blue. So to that end I made their coats purple with glowing aqua symbols
original

modified


 And for the face, again the increased resolution allowed for more details, so I used shading to increase the fidelity of existing details and to highlight things were possible.  Their eyesockets have been darkened which makes their thoroughly alien pink eyes all the more bizzare. I've also reduced the mouth size, turning it from a comical frown into a thin slitted frog mouth. I think these guys still need more work.
original

modified


 
Here is the album of images
http://imgur.com/a/Fjpgd

[p0ss]

I've also done some work on their spaceships


so here is what the corrupter looks like now:


And here is an alternate dark version:



And one of the design ideas I had for it, making the whole thing look like a digital projection, like a huge lcd screen.  ultimately It'd be best if it were animated, but even just glowmapped works quite well.



The current carrier:



And alternate designs:

[bayo]

Hi. imho a model preview is more interesting. It is hard to see something like that.

[p0ss]

Once I had made the alien aircraft darker, and since I've already done re-skins of the human soldiers and civilians,  the human aircraft started to look pretty bright too, so I made some adjustments.


Here is the current Firebird:


And here are some alternate textures:




Here is the current Sacaren:


And here is a darker version:


Looks a bit stealthier right?

[p0ss]

Hi. imho a model preview is more interesting. It is hard to see something like that.

 Good suggestion, I'll take some screens and post them.

[p0ss]

Here are some screens I just took in Blender, obviously the poses are a bit weird, but hopefully they show what my textures look like on a model.

Ortnok
(the head and body are different skin sets, two of eight variants)


Bloodspider
(the bloodier version, one of five variants)


Taman
(Darker and a different colour scheme)


Soldier
(darker, more dirty, with the new moustache and sunglasses head combo, one of 40+ variants)


Firebird
(Darker, more dirty, one of five variants)



Corrupter
(the LCD skin, one of 5 variants)


Carrier
(the purple skin, but i think the aqua skin works better, still variety is king, one of four variants)


And of course the alien weapon textures I made a couple of days ago go with them too.

Kerrblade
(darker and more battle scarred, one of four variants)



Plaspistol
(more colourful, one of four variants)


Plasblaster
(more colourful and more battle scarred, one of four variants)


I would post 3D versions of other ships, but this is just meant to give the general gist of what I am going for,  in general, everything is darker, dirtier and using new colour variants.

[Kildor]

there is one problem with UFO models. They are used only on geoscape, not in the battlescape. Crafts on maps are objects from brushes. So we need to change textures (afaik tex_ufo) and maps too.

[p0ss]

there is one problem with UFO models. They are used only on geoscape, not in the battlescape. Crafts on maps are objects from brushes. So we need to change textures (afaik tex_ufo) and maps too.

 I thought as much, I had planned to reskin that directory at some point, however I am still playing with the overall theme, so I might wait until I'm happy with the geoscape skins before I start doing multiple versions of 50+ textures, however it is certainly on my todo list.

[H-Hour]

Thanks p0ss. There's some nice stuff in here. One thing I would suggest is to test your work in-game. The game's renderer treats colours very differently than Blender will. In particular, it seems to turn darker textures into near black. That's why it's good to check.

I can't say we'll use all of them, but I like th reskin on the firebird and the ortnok. Probably other stuff too, but I will need to see how it looks in-game. I'm away this week so probably won't get to it for a while, thougu.

[p0ss]

Thanks p0ss. There's some nice stuff in here. One thing I would suggest is to test your work in-game. The game's renderer treats colours very differently than Blender will. In particular, it seems to turn darker textures into near black. That's why it's good to check.

I can't say we'll use all of them, but I like th reskin on the firebird and the ortnok. Probably other stuff too, but I will need to see how it looks in-game. I'm away this week so probably won't get to it for a while, thougu.

 To be honest I'm not sure how to do that, short of recompiling from source each time I want to see what they look like.

[Mattn]

there is no need to recompile anything - if you only change textures you can run run a map that includes those textures or models where you made skins for (the models might also already be visible via menus)

[MCR]

p0ss, I will integrate some of those textures in-game. Thanks for all your contributions. 

[MCR]

Included your bloodspider texture variations in-game: http://ufoai.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=ufoai/ufoai;a=commit;h=54b64a70d5b16c926f858f367d88551ca9cd563f

Thanks again.