I was delighted to hear last week that the Instinct Technology Intellectual Property Rights have been acquired by www.instinctengine.com where development of the SDK will be continuing, eventually in an Open Source capacity. This is great news for Irish game development and will hopefully see a thriving community grow around it and see the resurrection of the real-time versions of some of the art you’ll see on this blog. I look forward to seeing some of the characters reanimated, particularly the character below. Best of luck to all involved!
This guy was the first model I created commercially, under contract to Torc Interactive (creators of the Instinct Engine), which eventually led to my being hired full-time some months later. It was in production on this character that I knew that this was what I wanted to for a living. It was the first time I had done any proper low poly work, I had never tackled a character with a tight poly budget before, neither had I successfully unwrapped a character for texturing, both disciplines essential for the high/lowpoly normal mapping pipeline, so many iterations were required! All but one of the images below are the high res version. Unfortunately the “male banshee” as he was known, nor his female counterpart, ever made it past a few early tech demos and prototypes but he became something of a company mascot for a time and I’ve always remembered him fondly. Obviously he was a bad guy, he had a long range piercing scream that could deafen a man and close up clawed melee attacks that could cut through flesh like butter. He moved like a large ape, not particularly quickly but extremely menacing in his slow but steady advances. The high res versions here are procedurally textured, with some post work in Photoshop. Mark Cullen, a senior artist at the time, provided the diffuse and specular textures for the low res version bottom left.
The image on the bottom right was done when Mudbox 1.0 was released, long before the acquisition by Autodesk. I retopologised the low poly version of the male banshee and sculpted the detail as part of an evaluation of the new tech. Good memories!
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