Final Major Project - Colossus research

One of my final major project (FMP) ideas was to create a "colossus".  A colossus is basically a giant being create from inanimate matter.  The game "Shadow of the Colossus" (SotC)created by TeamIco is obviously a great inspiration here.  In SotC each colossus is not only a boss, but also a puzzle - you have to find a way to bring down each one in a different way, which normally involves finding a gap in their attacks and ways to climb towards their weak points so you can maliciously stab them.

I have been doing a little early concepting to get feedback.. One cool thing about SoTC is that they have 16 of 'em - so they have to try and get as much variety as possible, so have a variety of designs and characters, from the standard humanoid biped, through bull-like creations and giant flying thingies.  Watching the above video it's also worth noting they mix up the environments too, giving each battle a "theatre".

Out of these the middle left was most popular - but is very "typical"

I'm not going too far into the design for now, although I have lots of ideas n stuff...   Whats more important is determining what is possible and how to achieve this.

Two ways to approach, many pitfalls

There are two ways to approach this project 

1) as a huge animated character/skeletal mesh in UDK

This will be a highly detailed model made in 3DS Max, but will not take advantage of the UDK engine - being able to construct and combine meshes at a low resource cost.

2) As a living environment, shaped as a sentient creature

This will be constructed in UDK from many meshes modeled in 3DS Max & Zbrush.  This will be extremely hard to animate properly (walk cycle & possibly a wake up), especially with real-time lighting.  This will however leave lots of room for adding detail and different parts (leaning towards this)

I want to have a very cool and impressive end product, and for that I want it to be two things 

1) next gen = Highly detailed and realistic

2) Animated in some way = Everyone uses the net & is best way to impress & increase coverage

Animating a whole level obviously has technical limitations - not just from a hardware point but also in my experience.  I want to do something ambitious and engaging but need to know the limitations.  There are of course ways around animating everything in realtime - even a short scene of massive eyes opening and birds flying away due to vibrations could have impact for example.

Initial Tests

The first issue is size - we want this to be massive!  So the first thing I do?  go into UDK and see how big I can actually make this thing... I literally hit the roof of the level

Here is the biggest possible landscape size and highest I can get the mesh (note the teapot head)

In the above picture the landscape is on apar with a continent and takes around 30 minutes to travel corner to corner.  It took around a minute to hit the floor after jumping from the head.  It's simply too big - UDK has draw errors and everything slows down loads.  I was hoping that I could create gropus of objects (called prefabs in UDK) and animate them basically through matinee as movers - That don't work though and each mesh needs to be animated individually, which is not really do-able.

Here's a very quick blocked out colossus to test scale

Here's a quick video (sorry-ish for quality) to show varying size of colossi - ranging from 20 feet to a mile... also working on landscaping for the first time