This past March I got to work through TracerMedia Interactive on a new iPhone app that was just released called Cornhole All-Stars.  The game is being published by JUFTi, a new company formed by Jon Myers and Chuck Hootman.  I was responsible for some of the 3d assets, including the characters Bucketfoot Bill, Awesome Carl and some of the sets, only the models though -   the concepts and textures were done by someone else at the studio.  The game was just released and is available for download now.  I played it over the weekend and it seems pretty sweet.  I look forward to seeing more games from Jon and the other people at JUFTi.

Jon’s got an article about the making of this game over on his blog.  Check it out!

*The Columbus Dispatch has an article about the game and Jon.  You can read it here.

I box-modeled a very basic base mesh in Maya, only worrying about the rough form and trying to keep everything as quads for Zbrush.  Usually I do a good amount of building in Maya before turning to Zbrush, but wanted to try starting with less.  I also planned on using the Transpose Master tool to change his pose into something a bit more neutral.  

I then took my mesh into Zbrush and broke it down into polygroups to help with hiding and sculpting certain areas.  I’d never really used the poly groups all that much in the past, but boy was it helpful and will definitely be something I continue to use in the future.  I also went ahead and bulked out the proportions a bit as well as changed his pose to something a bit more neutral.

I sculpted away, working to achieve the overall shapes and silhouettes as well as the details necessary.  After a bit of sculpting I realized I’d forgotten to add Zryais’ antennae to my original base, so i went back to Maya to make this change (left image).  If you’ve ever used Zbrush and had to make changes to your base mesh, you know it changes the vertex order and will destroy your levels.  To get around this i was able to use the “project all” function which will transfer sculpted detail from one base to the next (right image).  I’m looking forward to Go-Z (in zb4) which will allow closer integration with traditional 3d apps and solve this problem.

After i finished my final sculpt i exported out a medium range mesh with enough detail that i could make out all my landmarks.  I used good ole’ Make Live in maya to use the sculpted mesh as a base for my low res mesh.  You can also use Zbrush or Topogun or Nex to do this, i just stuck with the original in this instance.  Once the low res mesh was finished and UV’d, i baked out my normals and AO using a great free program that most people have heard of, xNormal.  I created all the rest of the maps in photoshop using basic tools.  I did however use the polypaint tools in Zbrush to get the long straight green lines on his skin and just used Maya to transfer the maps.

That’s pretty much everything, so i’ll just end this blurb with a little turntable of Zryais.  Let me know what you think, and be sure to check out the rest of the images in my Gallery!