Antlion (Evolution)
The antlion, a disposable enemy that haunts the player during the Coast chapters, experienced a surprising deal of evolution, although mainly texturally.
Version 0: Pre-Birther
RTB briefly discusses the early forms of the antlions, including a few concepts on the same page:
"The Antlions were some of the first creatures to be created and went through many augmentations and additions over the course of the project. They were heavily armored to begin with, but tearing them to bits with bullets was just too much fun, so we turned them into cannon fodder."
The antlion's condition pre-Birther is fairly unclear, but there are some VMTs leftover in the /materials/models/Antlion that hint at the claimed early origin, with one having a M#CL-style filename:
"aliengeneric3.vmt" "M9CL.vmt"
Gallery
Concepts
- Antlion1.jpg
- Antlion2.jpg
- Antlion3.jpg
Version 1: Birther / Pel Release Antlion
Before the placement of the antlion's textures into a composite sheet, the model (without animations) was copied into a separate model named "Birther.mdl" in the Leak's base directory. While the UVs are different from the current Leak antlion, the mesh is identical to the Leak version.
During the Facepunch leaks, Pelpix released the textures for this version.
Trivia
- Pelpix first released the thumbnails (256x) for the textures, and then shortly after corrected it to be the full-res versions.
Gallery
Renders
Textures
"abdomen.vtf"
"antlion_parts.vtf"
"case.vtf"
"caseback.vtf"
Screenshots
Version 2: Leak Antlion
The antlion present in the leak has a large degree of difference from the final, but surprisingly little from the Birther model. Compared to the final, it is UVed completely differently and has a
Gallery
Renders
Textures
"abdomen.vtf"
"antlion_parts.vtf"
"case.vtf"
"caseback.vtf"
Version 3: Shader Antlion
An intermediate antlion that makes an appearance in the mid-2004 slideshow D3DTutorial10_Half-Life2_Shading. In the images shown, it uses the leak antlion textures, with a rather exaggerated normal map on top.
Gallery
Screenshots
Version 4: Final Antlion
The antlion that appears in the final version of Half-Life 2. It implements an interesting skin-changing functionality, with 4 different implemented skins, and downscales somewhat the individual texture sheet from 512x1024 to 512x512.
Gallery
Renders
Textures
Screenshots
Version 5: Placeholder Worker
Briefly appearing in Teaser Two for Episode Two, it appears to be a placeholder for the antlion worker before the final model was made. It is much more similar to the antlion grub unlike the more uniformly colored worker, with a brown head and glowing mass at the end of the abdomen.
Screenshots
Comparisons
Earlier Antlion Textures
Final Antlion Sheets
