This was a very early test, made 3 months before the Party Version was finished. As you can see, the 3d model of the rhinoceronts were quite poor, but at least we started to work on the skin shader and the volumetric shafts of light. The grass was also a "fist test". This original 3d scene didn't have trees at all on the background, so in this picture they are painted by hand to give me and idea of how it should look like. In the same way, the eye of the rhino was drawn on to the 2d screenshot of the intro with the same purpose.
Here is the second version of the model rendered in Max. Actually, we made lot of models. Each day, with the new "3d models library", a new slighly modified version of the "last" rhino was included.
Later the final version of the rhino was made, as a result of the collaboration of both artists. This more agressive and convincing rhino was definitevly perfectly fitting in the feeling of Paradise we wanted to transmit. Note the low tesselation level of the horn in this Max render. In the PartyVersion of the intro itself, the polycount of the modell is 6848 triangles.
This was the look of the scene just before the PartyVersion. The 3d trees were finally added, and so the new rhino mesh. We also changed the alpha-tested grass with an algha-blended one, what gave a lot smoother feeling to the scene. Note the low tesselation of the horn here again and the missing shadow behind the rhinos, comparing with the FinalVersion.
Have a look at the original texture and mapping we designed for the rhino. As you can see, almost all the texture is plannarly mapped to the poligons, preserving unstreched mapping almost everywhere. This made things a lot easier, cause then we could draw the texture within the code almost in a natural way.
Here is the second version of the eye, directly painted over the procedurally generated texture.
This is what we finally made, due to the lack of time. As you can see, the eye of the rhino is a bit streched. The reason is that finnaly the uv mapping of the rhino was changed and distorted. So, the inverse distorion was applied on the painting of the texture to compensate it. In the other hand this texture, as it only provides the diffuse color information, (ie, a bit of ink here and there), is quite small: 256x256, just enought to catch the detail of the eye. As you can imagine, most of the visual work of the rhinos is done in the normal map and the pixel shader.
This is the final shader applied to the model, where a more realistic global illumination is correcly applied to give the "in shadow" area in the botton part of the mesh. At the same time, the grass just behind the rhinos is correcly shaded to fake the soft shadows.
