 | BEOWULF - THE GAME (pilot)
Beowulf - a high-tech game pilot project developed by 3d-io in 2005, aimed at publisher presentations and computer game trade fairs. It is a real-time 3D outdoor & indoor action-adventure technology and gameplay demo. Beowulf license has been acquired by UbiSoft which has annonunced and released the full game in November 2007 for PC, XBOX 360 and PSP.
BEOWULF - TRIVIABEOWULF is the great masterpiece of Anglo-Saxon literature. For centuries, it was orally passed from generation to generation by north european people. The highly artistic, action-filled narrative is entangled with warrior speeches, songs, chants, remembrances of battles past, and pagan mythology. It testifies to the great upheavals that occurred in northern civilizations as the poem took form during the early middle ages. Like no other work of art, this saga captures the archaic spirit of the viking age. | 
...J.R.R. Tolkien once said: "Beowulf is among my most valued sources." | | BEOWULF - Concepts & Style | "BEOWULF (pilot)" design was based on original image material from photos and illustrations we have collected from hundreds of books. The main goal was to catch the original look of the "North" and bake it into a game level. It was important to create a unique look & feel and avoid cold photorealistic look. Jelena Kevic and Daniel Igarza have created, based on our huge image library, whole sets of concept arts for both characters and levels.
All concepts were transfered by Christoph Kucher into the high resolution 3D geometry and afterwards baked into objects suitable for real-time display. In the case of Heorot Hall, each board and each ornament were designed and carefully placed by hand, to keep up with the original look of the concept art.
The 3D character design was defined, modeled and textured by Igor Posavec, using Autodesk 3D Studio Max and Lightwave. The character animation and especially the difficult defence movments and sword techniques were motion captured, cleaned and exported into our own "Elasticity" 3D game engine.
"BEOWULF (pilot)" consisted not only of a demo level with a character presentation, but it also includes over 20 press images and 2 minutes of rendered CG cinematics. | 
The main difficulty in the production was keeping 3 different production pipelines running into the same direction: Concept Art, Poster/Press-Images and Realtime Graphics. Those were done by 3 groups of independent artists and the loss of style defined in the Concept Art during the production was the greatest danger. Likewise cascading from Concept Art to the High-Poly 3D Models usually causes a certain loss of detail. And by its nature, moving to Realtime Graphics produces even more detail loss compared to the original High-Poly geometries. Thanks to our talented people and tight communication between teams, we have managed to port the original concepts to the real-time Game almost "losslessly".
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