Meet the Professor!

Hello friends! In our comments we often mention that we are doing our best to improve not only the gameplay of but also the visual aspect of Exoplanet in order to achieve the high modern standards and expectations of the PC audience. Therefore we want to introduce to you one of the key characters of the Exolanet’s story which may serve as an example of the desired content’s quality. This grim type is called Professor Lemfather and he was sculpted and textured by our 3D artist Constantine Yunkevich @ Manson. With your questions, constructive critique and propositions you can address to him directly: reanim.root@gmail.com

Read the rest of the post for HD-pictures and a 3D-screenshot.

As you have already noticed, our Professor has quite realistic proportions of his body but there is a lot of stylization in his texture and geometry details. According to our main concept of the game, we don’t want to create the sophisticated tech-demo instead of the game and super-realistic state-of-the-art but extremely performance demanding graphics instead of the living world. We want to work out and keep the particular visual style for Exoplanet, suitable for the picture of the wild, dangerous Frontier planet and its inhabitants. This approach is the most reasonable for our independent developers team, as well as in terms of production efficiency as for the idea of understanding games not as “product” which must sell well, but as a some kind of interactive art. A medium to tell fascinating stories and give the player unique experience. All this principles we apply to our character design.

In Exoplanet’s Universe Professor Lemfather is an infamous personality in the high ranked scientific society. Ambitious and ill-tempered genius (as he likes to define himself), he demonstrates both huge talent and sometimes frightening obsession with his quite exotic ideas. Lemfather rose quickly to the top of the scientific world and fell deeper than any of his rival due to his lack of ethical sense an total immunity to the common moral. Professor was always a proponent of extreme measures and an adept of the “crucial experiment” approach in his studies, who never rely on the pure theories (especially suggested by other scientist). The consequences of his bold and often illegal experiments have left many visible marks in his own appearance. Some of this augmentations and scars will play significant roles in the quests of Exoplanet as well. Currently Professor Lemfaher has the status of the dangerous special criminal and is wanted in many Old Wordls for his shady dealings. At the moment he has dug in on the dusty peripheral planet K’Thasis for some unknown reason, maybe searching for some proves of his crazy hypotheses or in pursuit of the treasures of some ancient alien culture. Who knows?

This selfish and cunning man with his wide criminal connections beyond the K’Tharsis could be a powerful ally for the hero but also can become a fearsome foe, if you dare to interfere in his business.

Creating the Professor we were inspired by 3 somehow related and quite negative character types: the classic “mad scientist” archetype, the cruel cyborg “man-machine”-type villains and an amoral “maniacal Nazi doctor” image. The outfit of the Professor emphasizes his current situation in the world: he has been dragged faraway from high-tech sterile environments of the Core Worlds and Academic laboratories and is forced to wear the self-made gadgets and devices. All his equipment has this worn out and gritty look to outline his lifestyle on the remote Frontier planet.

3D-screenshot (1Mb) – you can rotate the model with the left mouse button or use looped auto-playback (press arrow button in the right bottom cornerr to see the menu):

Programs used for creation of the model: