Unvanquished Forum

The egg is the structure where alien players spawn from. It can be built on walls and ceilings and therefor needs to fit roughly into a cubic bounding box. The egg is made up of two main elements, the slightly flexible outer body and a slimy balloon/membrane that grows inside. The balloon should be a seperate mesh and needs to be modeled in a way that allows the animator to have grow until it fills all the space inside the egg. It will then burst, spawning a new alien (this will be done by hiding the mesh and playing a particle effect) and regrow afterwards.

Have a look at the concept made by Pevel:

I'll create a sculpt for the egg. I'll retopo and texture once the sculpt gets the go ahead.

Great, welcome!

For the low-poly, in-game version of the egg, it should ideally be in the 3000-5000 triangle range at most, although lower is always better if you can manage it. Textures should be diffuse, normal, and specular in 2048 resolution, and you can optionally include a glow (emissive) map.

Pinging for updates.

I sculpted the alien egg to the concept given with some liberties to the top most part. I thought the tip of the gestation chamber should expand as if going through an intestine of sorts or open up like a flower petal in a sense. The egg itself is half a sphere that can be hidden below the chamber and be raised up when an egg/unit is being queued. If the sculpt looks good I can start the base mesh retopo and uving.

Alien egg side view.

Alien egg top view.

Very nice! Followed Pevel's concept pretty closely, and I like how it now looks in 3D. Let's see what Pevel and Viech say about it, they're in Poland and Germany respectively and should be awake later.

Eggcellent! Your changes with respect to the concept are pretty reasonable.

Good job so far! Is it possible to seperate the sections that make up the pod's walls? This would allow for the flower-petal like spread to be animated. (While I personally wouldn't have it open up completely, it would certainly look nice if the sections spread outwards while the egg grows, then contract back after it exploded.)

Well I didn't want the chamber's body to open up like a flower, I was only thinking about the pointed tips to imitate some movement of a queen giving birth so when the egg is close to hatching, the side walls will be slightly expanded to take that into consideration, nothing animation heavy.