nobby’s concept album V: Eagle Eyes On

Hey there Carmafans! nobbles here, back with another revealing glimpse into the progress towards a new Carmageddon (and about bloody time, I hear you cry). Hopefully this month's opening update will give you all plenty to discuss, and we look forward to getting your feedback in the forums.

As you'll have seen from the previous reveals we've done featuring our sometimes concept art man Doug Telford's artwork, the vehicles we've shown you are very much evolutionary – we look at the original cars, and we breathe on those designs, rather than going back to the drawing board. This is how I see the ethos of Carmageddon: Reincarnation, and it runs through the entire design of the new game's assets.

Going right back to when we were kicking off the project, I asked Doug to have a think about a look for the updated Eagle. My feeling was that the Eagle could be treated quite differently to the other vehicles – there was no reason we shouldn't look at making quite a radical departure from the previous Eagles, as they were all quite different. The original Eagle I designed was a hunch-backed, shark-mouthed beast purpose-built for ramming and ped mutilating:

The Eagle II that featured in The Splat Pack was… well, let's face it, it was the Batmobile:

And Carmageddon 2 featured a lineup with more overtly race-bred cars, and the Eagle III reflected that style decision (this has become the design I like least, in fact I actively dislike it, although at the time I was happy with my design):

So really, as long as the new car was predominantly red, the brief was quite open. The only direction I gave Doug was that I currently had a "sort of like the original Ford GT40" vibe bouncing round in my head, but it shouldn't unduly influence him.

Those of you with eagle eyes (ha! See what I did there?) will have spotted a hint of one of Doug's ideas in the first ever concept he did for us – the industrial scene with the Eagle giving it some via the Opponent Repulsificator.

Doug produced an initial range of Eagle sketches for us. (As I mentioned, this was back around the time of sketching the first scenes, and so we were also discussing ideas for the Repulsificator. We liked the idea of a physical device, but later rejected it on the grounds of it making vehicle design and construction overly dependent on an occasional PowerUp item.):

The designs also explored the idea of visual upgrades to the car's bodywork (it was one of the features of "Crackdown" that I/we loved – they implemented visual vehicle upgrades beautifully), and the work caused interesting discussions about ways in which we could design the upgrades in a way that made it obvious to the player what had been upgraded, and by how much.

There was a coloured up profile sketch in the sheets of roughs. We all really liked the partially open bodywork, with the over-size exhaust and motorcycle style silencer. That shape also had those hints of GT40 I'd been thinking about:

We weren't too sure about the blade design… But it prompted us to discuss how various blade designs could be a visual upgrade for your Eagle that you could perhaps pick up or buy in the game.

So, I asked Doug to work us up an image of the new Eagle, based on his colour sketch, but with a more "conventional" blade and slightly less cartoony dimensions. He duly obliged, and sent us through this image:

Now, I have to say that much as I really like this rendering, I'm not sure it's quite there yet. A little too much of the beautiful chunkiness and implied proportions that the previous sketch had have gone from this version. I'd like to enlarge the cabin, and the wheels, and re-jig the side exhausts…

However, Doug's illustration was a good piece of work to use in presentations and so on, and so we paused further progress at that point with the intention of re-visiting it when it was time to really nail down what exactly we wanted our new Eagle to look like.

Soon after this exercise, I was contacted for the first time in a while by my old friend and ex-colleague Tez Lane, Stainless's's's original concept artist (see my previous concept album blog). He confessed that he'd been unable to resist the desire to produce a bit of, as he put it, "Carma Fan Art" in the form of an Eagle model. And would I like to see it? Would I FECK! A few minutes later an email with an attachment from my Australia-ensconced buddy plopped into my Inbox. Here's what it contained:

YUM. Well, this perfectly illustrates how vast the spectrum of design is, and how each of us can have a really strong and totally diverse vision of our perfect Eagle! Tez's visual was largely based on a model he'd been working on, and he included the Max model file along with the visual. I passed the model  to our lead artist Will, who fiddled with it a bit, and in seemingly no time at all, we had the Tez Eagle driving around in our WIP engine/environment:

SSH!! Don't tell anyone that I've sneaked a couple of very, very early prototype in-game images out for you guys! ;) But hey, I think it's about time you got to see there's real progress happening here in the Carma Crypt. In fact, we're a lot further on now than the little vignettes in these screenshots suggest – I had to load quite an old build up in order to grab these screens for y'all – as our rendering engine is currently undergoing a major re-write and upgrade (i.e. the programmers broke it). Once they finish putting it back together again, I'll sneak out a few more… :) It's gonna be, as they say, AWESOME.

But really, the main reason for this latest concept art blog is to get these two very different designs out into the community, so we can discuss with you guys what sort of design direction you'd like to see the next Eagle take. I'm not saying either of the featured concepts is right. They both have their great design points, and both have some aspects that would need serious tweaking before I could see them making it into the game.

So, I look forward to meeting up with you all over in the forums, where we can discuss this core feature of the game in more detail. Once again, thanks for dropping by to read this latest instalment – and once again, we really appreciate your continued interest in the project. See you again soon! Nob xxx

P.S. Oh, and check out the Polls section – you can vote there on your fave Eagle!