I finished the Mysterions.  What should have taken me only a few minutes to do turned into hours because I was having way too much fun thinking up of ways to animate them.  And by “them” I mean the balls.  Lots and lots of balls.  But I’m getting ahead of myself here…

First, here is how they looked in the original game:

To start off, I created a grid of 8 by 8 by 8 balls, or in other words a 3D grid of 512 balls.  Then I whittled away the corners of the “cube” of balls until it was a “sphere” of balls.  That left me with 208 balls.  That was it for the work needed to be done in 3D Studio Max, and it was time to bring it into Unity.  Here is a screenshot of how it looks in Max:

Now within Unity, I was able to play with the balls by creating a script to animate them.  I tried a few things and then stumbled upon a really nice way to move and make them grow and shrink.  It’s basically a very simple Simplex noise fractal algorithm that takes up only 13 lines of code, but if you watch the video you’d swear that there’s some kind of intelligence behind the movement.  It’s so mesmerizing.  Ok, I’ve kept you in anticipation long enough – here’s the video!

I had to go back and tweak the Gazutroid model a bit.  It was feeling way too much like…	And not enough like…

So I gave my Gazurtoid model some heavy set eyebrows in an angry pose, and I think it made a big difference.  Hope you agree!

All the races are done… pop open that bottle of 1959 Dom Perignon that you have laying around!  Yeah, ignore the fact that I haven’t done the Mysterions yet… but they’re like a 5 minute job (just a bunch of colored spheres).  But all of the *hard* races are done.  Woo hoo!

The Velox turned out really well I think.  I basically started by looking around for free models of insects and came across a decent looking low poly ant one.  I imported it into 3D Studio Max and separated out the parts of the ant’s body into their own meshes so they could be animated using a simple method.  The only parts of the ant that has any rig and skin on it are the antennae.  I made the ant stand “upright”, created some robes for the ant to wear, replaced the eyes with bigger fly-like ones, and created the ship interior (background) from scratch.  I made everything as faithful to the original version as possible:

So here are some screenshots of the work in progress, and a video of how the ant… sorry, I mean Velox, looks animated in Unity.