Game Res Character - Octopus V. 2 WIP

Here's a work in progress of a new game res character I have been kicking around in head for a while. I started the original version a while ago but decided it didn't quite have the character I was going for. I think this character has some potential for fun animations and game mechanics.

Here's the rough sketch from photoshop where I'm just trying to get some ideas out on paper.....or screen in this case, and Zbrush sculpt. The low res version is 2,396 triangles.

The diffuse texture map still needs work. I purposely made it very monochromatic to start with because I knew I would need to be tweaking lighting, post processing, and materials in UDK at the same time.

I didn't want to spend too much time on an environment so I just threw in some static meshes and created a few lights and a new post processing chain.

The chain was setup with a material effect where the blues became more saturated as the camera got further away. However, I had a lot of problems getting this effect to behave correctly. It's a fairly simple effect so I'm not entirely sure what I was doing wrong but it seemed to have trouble when I added the Uber Post Processing node to  the chain.

Eventually, I just moved the effect to be rendered after Uber Post Processing rather than before it. I still get the blue tint but it doesn't seem to utilize the scene depth anymore. Oh well.  I will probably get rid of this effect all together anyway because I don't want it to overpower the pawn's lighting.

Here's what it looks like in game at the moment. Right now, the octopus is just a skeletal mesh that I threw in the scene with a single bone so I could see how the model was being lit more accurately than just leaving it as a static mesh. The second image is a paint over of the octopus so I could figure out what I want to do next with the texturing and material. 

Next up, rigging and animation! After that, I'll go ahead and create a new pawn class so that the octopus is the playable character before I continue on with texturing. This way I can see how it's deforming and what is happening with the lighting while the character moves.