Outmode: The Forklift

With The Waiting Room project completed, it was time to move onto the futuristic forklift. The purpose of this prop is to act as an obstacle to stop gamers venturing off where they shouldn't be on the map. This means high resolution textures as before finding the object can't be moved, the gamers are going to get extremely close to it!

Because the game is set in a futuristic land of robots, I didn't want to make a bog-standard, modern day forklift but one that would fit into a scene of duelling robots and technology. However, guessing what forklifts are likely to look like years from now, proved a bit of a challenge! Therefore, the design was based on the projection of car and vehicle designs instead.

And what became immediately obvious? Curves. And lots of them! Therefore, for my design I tried to bring this idea into the shape of a traditional forklift.

Obviously the actual forklift part had to stay right-angled to give the impression of strength and durability, but the main body of the design is all rounded like the car examples.

First began building the base mesh using as little polys whilst retaining as much detail as possible:

So far, although a good start, poly detail needs to be distributed slightly. For example, extra detail is added in the tires but on reflection, the eye level of the players will be the mid section of the exterior as well as the interior. Therefore, this detail can be left to normal maps to portray. Also, I'm not happy with the steering wheel, the shape feels off and needs figuring out. Update to follow in the next couple of days!