Very nice outfit, always loved that alien! 
Ah the BELIEVE alien gettin’ the tech upgrade! Would love to see more about their culture, their world. Unless of course they’re hostile;)
wow the hardsurface looks very nice on the alien 
great job 
Thanks for the replies everyone!
Psychnaut - Funny you should wish to see more of their world, because I started to develop this world in my head, started sculpting and thought…humm… What if I mixed my old alien model with this world?
So I started sculpting these large stonehenge like structures. I then moved them over to Maya Viewport 2.0 with their new DX11 uber shader (that is amazing by the way) and started playing around with Maya paint effects (all of the paint effects stuff will need to be converted to more efficient real-time models.) But the goal is to get all of this into UDK and have a cool little environment to run around in and look at interesting stuff. The aliens will be be leftovers from this ancient time/culture. I wanted to mix the tech look of the aliens and have that in contrast with the beautiful and lushness of the environment. There is still obviously a lot of work to still be done but I will try to add updates here on this thread to show where things are headed.
Hope you all enjoy!
Peace-NickZ.
Really awesome new works!
Thanks Solidsnake!!! Good to hear from you sir!
Here is a little update using a new mesh insert brush…so fun!!
Adding some wires.
Loving the look of the alien Nick; great stuff!
-Joseph
Awesome work!
Thanks everyone!
Joseph…big fan of yours my friend! 
Here is a little more work from tonight. I think I want to work on this chest plate thing a bit more. I’m thinking about armor for the back of the elbow.
Peace-NickZ.
A little more on the chest area.
Following this intensely 
I have to ask, from my own experience, isn’t hard to add to an old piece without revisit the whole model? Or have you done some sculpting on the alien?
Santis,
I already revisited the feel on the model so I was already kinda working on it.
Sad but true story, I lost all my original ZBrush sculpts on this one so I had to recreate it from the base meshes I had along with my displacement maps, so I guess I was already doing more work on an older project than I anticipated.
Once I started to add the hard surface stuff it really is starting to feel a lot more different than before. The old project had more of a demonic feel to the character (at least that is what I was going for) but now I am hoping to have this feeling of a more intelligent alien creature that is interfaced with technology. Think about the original Alien (H.R. Giger’s) the creature is actually fairly intelligent, well what if that creature continued to develop in intelligence to the point that it would interface with technology (not necessarily it’s own but rather a more intelligent race, that is where the ancient stonehenge statues will come into play).
I guess I am just trying to come up with this little back story for a little world/space to walk around in in UDk. I think I need to flesh things out a little more but I at least have enough of a little frame work to start working with.
Hope that was the kind of info you were looking for…but I think this new direction I want to take is making more excited about completing the art!
So I have been pretty busy trying to learn as much about UDK as possible (Man I love that Engine!!) So I put together some sculpts in ZBrush and painted them up, threw them in UDK and started to build a level. I’ve always made characters in the past so don’t laugh at my environment work. (I’m trying to get better and I have a lot of respect for the environment artist out there…games today demand a great artist and great art for every discipline now.
These screenshots were taken directly from UDK, I’m not going to touch up the mistakes…It is what it is.
Sorry, I have too many images so I need to break up the post.
So some of the things that I wanted to accomplish:
- Adding an animated skeletal mesh to the level.
- Adding dynamic physical chains.
- Adding animated creatures for the sky. (bats)
- Adding atmospherics with fog for the overall level and area/volume fog.
- Start creating more advanced shaders that animate and have more complex things like fresnel and reflections.
- Animated pieces of the environment that you can interact with.
- Animated geometry via world position offset in the shader.
- Interesting animated skybox/clouds. (Using UV distortion to get the funky cloud rolls)
- Custom collision geometry.
- Ability to have static meshes become physical and interact with the player.
So this was a cool little test level and I learned a lot from it, I hope to make the next one even better!
Here is a video that I made that shows a walkthrough of the environment.
[vv]66185592[/vv]
Hope you all enjoy the work!
Peace, NickZ.
Wow, Nick! That’s a lot of work, so awesome! On the verge of top row
Sorry to hear about having to redo stuff 
i started learning udk a few days ago and i have to say you did an amazing and inspiring job!!
can’t wait for the next level
Thanks Fynn. So what are your goals in UDK? It took me awhile to get my head wrapped around things. but I’m starting to feel a bit more comfortable. I have a write up on my blog that explains how to get a character in and animated for a portfolio turntable if you are interested.
http://nickzucc.blogspot.com/2012/07/udk-how-to-render-animated-turntable.html
fantastic stuff…!! man thats alot of purple…:D… have to re-ajust my eyes …
thanks so much for the link!! i’m sure it will help me a lot
my goal is the same as yours i think, i want to create my own level where i can interact with some objects like opening a door or something
just a place where i can go through that i created 
i really adore the atmosphere you’ve created, especially the volumetric fog or whatever you call that^^