Cthulhu in Amnesia help

[The Rock Worm]

Okay...hm... how do I put this. Well, see, its like this. I'm always looking for interesting animated models to fill my portfolio with and I want my next project to be a bit bigger than my previous ones. I haven't quite decided yet, but this were my ideas so far:

1. Fuchur or "Falcor" as he is called in english from the Neverending Story (the badass book version of course, not the flying tampon from the movies. Non-movie illustrations of Falcor are rare, but this might come somewhat close to the description.)

2. The Lady of Pain from Planescape: Torment (might be a bit boring animation - wise but the mesh would be challenging)

3. Some sort of interesting Lovecraftian being. Yes, this could also be Cthulhu, although I'd prefer a more "non-standard" version. He has been depicted in art so incredibly often already, the concept would need some sort of interesting twist to stand out from the crowd. The pictures you linked to are already an interesting start but I wouldn't want to use them as an exact concept. (They're too stylized for that anyway )

Soooo... theoretically, there is the possibility that you could maybe get your whole Cthulhu. But before you get your hopes too high - I still haven't entirely solved my maya - to - hpl - export issues, so we probably wouldn't even get him into the game.

Besides, if he was that big, even if we got him imported, we would run into all sorts of issues with the textures...I would have to use tiling textures a lot to get a decent resolution close-up, which means I have to make up for the lack of unique normal map with more triangles - and we don't even know how many triangles HPL can handle on a skinned mesh. Also I don't know if its even possible to use more than one material on the same mesh in HPL.
Another thing: the Ambient Occlusion would need to be baked into the vertex color or a separate lightmap for it to look good with the tiling textures, but there doesn't seem to be a way to multiply vertex color or a separate map over a diffuse map with the shaders available...

you see, there would be thousands of problems. Nothing that can't be solved I guess, but I'm a modeler and animator, not an expert on anything HPL - related so we'd probably need a lot of additional help for that.

I'm also with Kman here - right now the story idea sounds cool, but too vague and - most importantly - way too difficult to achieve. At least too difficult in HPL. If we were using UDK with its powerful material editor, stable and flexible animation pipeline, countless scripting and coding options and huge detailled documentation, I'd say its possible. But with HPL - eh I don't know...

Maybe we could talk about a smaller Lovecraft enemy instead and solve the Cthulhu thing with the tentacle only idea The chaser mentioned? But I'd like the concept to be a bit more fleshed out before I start such a project...

Sorry for a difficult story, I thought up the idea before even my head told me it was too much.

Good to hear that you want a Lovecraftian monster. I had chosen Cthulhu because we was so well known. My first intro to the Lovecraft world was Quake 1 and its boss Shub-Niggurath. Because she was the first 'Ancient One', she's kind of my favorite (even though the Quake version was more of a legless Dark Young).

As for a smaller 'Cthulhu Mythos' enemy, how about a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath? Imagine this: You're in the forest at night, all alone. It's fall so all of the trees around you have no longer have leaves. All of a sudden one of them (that resembled the static trees) comes to life (spreads its tentacles and legs, open its many mouths, etc) and chases you! You escape to a small house in the woods, but now you're terrified! You have no idea which tree is a real tree, and which is a Dark Young!