Protean is a real-time 3D graphics demo that I created in 2002 along with another artist at Whatif Productions to showcase a cool morph-like technology in Whatif's rendering engine. We chose four extremely different character shapes to blend between, to really push the technology to its limits.



Creating the models was a very challenging process. The four characters all had to share the same number of vertices, so each had to be started from the same basemesh topology, pushing and pulling edgeloops to make their different silhouettes. We decided the demon character would have wings, so each of the other three would have analogous features... four arms for the alien, smoke stacks for the robot, and for the minotaur the wings would be hidden down inside his back.



We also used the demo to showcase Whatif's realtime material layering features. Each character had an animated texture, tiled across the body and using a bitmap-based per-pixel mask to limit it to specific areas on the body. We used heightmaps so they could be used for real-time tesselation and displacement as a future feature.

  

The crawling worms were for the demon, the sweat and veins for the minotaur. I created these maps as animated 3D geometries in 3ds Max, arranging the edges so they would tile in 2D, and animating them to loop endlessly, then baked them into sequential heightmaps.



I created the following color studies for texturing the Protean characters. Here's the study for the alien. I envisioned it as having a blend of crustacean, snail, and mantis features.



This is my color study for the demon. I strived to give the characters diametric color schemes so the blending would be even more dramatic.



I also created some environment concepts for a planned 2008 upgrade to the demo, but unfortunately the studio closed down before we could implement it.



The idea was that each character would have its own themed environment, and the environments would morph between each other as the characters morphed. For example when the demon morphed to the minotaur then the fire on the tree would morph into green leaves, and the lava-fall would morph into the waterfall.