Uruk-hai heads

This was another project made for The Last Days Mount&Blade MOD in 2007. It's my interpretation of the infamous breed of orks called uruk-hai and it was based on descriptions (and their interpretations) extracted from Tolkien's books, provided by other team members.

It was a complex project mainly because:
1. We needed the uruk-hai to look menacing, but at the same time the general uruk anatomy had to match the human form, as the engine only supported two native sets of skeletons at the time: one for humans and other for horses.
A second constraint came from the need to fit human helmets to the uruk-hai heads, otherwise a custom version of every helm would have to be produced.

2. we've decided to add as much variation as possible, so armies would look more believable and interesting. The engine had 3 different methods available to introduce these randomly generated differences: textures, head/face props and vertex morphs.

- Head/face props are small appendable meshes that use their own texture sheet. In humans, these slots were used by hair and beards. In the uruk-hai's I've added protruding ears, wounds, teeth, piercings and other stuff.
- The Vertex morphing technique is used to change facial features by displacing coordinates of group of vertexes, divided by anatomic features (nose width, eyebrows height, etc). For each of these features, the engine assign numeric values, from 0 (original position) to 1 (maximum displacement), but it's also possible to use negative or grater than 1 values, in wich case the engine estimates the positions.

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See also:
The mesh.
A sample of the head texture sheet.
A render showing all head textures variations.
A render showing all head/face props variations. (not up yet)
Facial vertex morphing examples. (not up yet)


I won't distribute the whole model as it's still in use, but you are free to use the image, as long as you respect the license.