DJHERO 1+2

DJ HERO was the first AAA game title that i worked on. I thought i would show the 1st set of concepts through to the finished models that went into the game. The initial style of the characters was heavily inspired by Vinal toys hence the mad types of characters. we wanted the shaders to be simple and the character to look as if they we're made from sharp plastic lines. Here is a line up of some of the character designs i had concepted. The silhouette is given to see if they stand up as significant shapes that can be distinguished as unique characters.




This Concept was one of my favorites with a giant of a man
 and a small Japanese lady playing the decks on his shoulders.



This Character Concept eventually became DJ Cleetus Cutz.
As you will see it was interesting that this character seemed to retain his
characteristics further along in the design process.
 I think partly due to using strong simple vinyl toy shapes and his Bio story.


Here are some crowd character concepts for the Day of the dead level.
I loved this idea for a level and it was great fun designing the colourfull characters that would populate the crowd.

In these drawings i'm trying to figure out how the giant party heads would animate.



I started to sketch this little guy down who was to be a slightly recluse genius scratcher kid who has never seen the light of day due to his obsessive training in his mum's basement. I like his dark quirky nature. He later on became DJ Itch.

His long cuffs we're an animators nightmare and we're later dropped....no pun intended.



Here i am sketching to see what shapes the vinyl toy style might take on the final model.


this was a 1st pass on Itch's model with record box in tow.
I really liked this little guy with his over sized army coat barely clinging to his skinny frame.


The style took on a big change after about a year into this project due to the merger with Activision and their Guitar hero style. We tried to retain the original humor and Left field topics of the vinyl toys, but still striving for a more characteristic semi realistic style brought on by the push toward the Guitar Hero style.

DJ Cleetus Cutz
Variant_01



Variant_02




DJ Kitty Smash.
Variant_01


Variant_02


this was a half way between the two styles that arose in the process.

And this was Kitty's original vinyl toy style.



DJ VundaBoy



Vundaboy was originally one of a set of twins they looked like this in vinyl toy style.
They were from the hedonistic daysof the Late 80's early 90's acid house raves that left them a little tweaked to say the least. A characteristic trate that is alive and kicking in the Vundaboy character today.


DJ Shadow


We wanted to do so much more with DJ shadow character, like literally turn him into a shadow with burning blue soul eyes playing the decks which would change back to a solid body from time to time to raise the crowd. Dj Shadow himself got really into the spirit of the game and came up with the crackin idea of When you hit euphoria button in the game the whole crowd within the nightclub would turn into the undead with all their eyes also burning.Well good i thought, but as par usual in the games industry the tech couldn't be done in time to implement.

Daft Punk.










Daft Punk we're the hardest characters to get right because of all the back and forth sign off process between them and us. But i have got to say that it was great because they really cared alot about how they would look in the game and gave us soo much great reference and colour charts to adhere to, but also understood that they were in the end being created as game characters. I really enjoyed working with them on their DaftPunk Characters.




After hearing that we had got Deadmau5 to sign up to the game i got started on creating his model. I used the same technic to create the leather jacket as i did on Daftpunk. The Iconic Deadmau5 head was great to model but was harder than you would think to get the shader working correctly.
A couple of varients below.I will try to get a render done of the Head that had the awesome display on the front.

 I love working out environments and layouts so i couldn't wait to jump on to the environment team for a couple of weeks and help out where i could. It was fairly rushed but i managed to get some detailing and colours done.


We didn't need the exterior of these clubs to be built, but i felt that it became clearer in my head if i knew location. Drawing these exteriors almost wrote a story of the location and who would attend that sort of place.






These are the sort of concept packs that we sent the outsource companys as guideline to work from.


DJ Cleetus Cutz.

If you compare the version of Cleetus from DJ1 to This version in DJ2 you will notice that we took a more realistic approach to him. His body proportions and facial features are slightly more realistic as are his clothes. We made an effort to put more detailing into the clothes and create shaders that defined each separate clothing part.



DJ Kitty Smash.

TO BE RENDERED

This was and Empire DJ called Fro Train that was concepted by a great artist called Dan Lish who works out of Brighton. He was a fantastic character to model.

Fro Train.




SURYA.


 Surya was one of the DJ's who worked on the tracks for the game down in Brick lane London. Anyone who has ever met Surya knows he is larger than life and should definatly be in a game.
I never got to create him in 3D but drew this concept putting him in clothes that he Dons when he preforms. I really wanted to model Surya and get him DJHero2  but there was no time left in the schedule and he got dropped from the character selection list. Shame for he would have been a great character to play.