DevLog #4 – Monster in the making (aka character creation)

Up till now, the progress on “What happened in Penance” was going pretty steady and smooth. Now however, it feels like I’ve hit my first speed bump. And that would be making a character from scratch.

I do have a fair bit of experience with 3d modeling, but so far the only thing I did was hard surface modeling. I tried sculpting once, but it just didn’t click with me. Plus my PC back then was a Quality Potato, so it’s not like I could do much even if I liked it.

Normally in a situation like this, you would go and hire a pro to do this, but sadly I’m too broke for this (PlsBuyMyGameSoICanHireAProperArtistNextTime ( ; || ; )’). Buying a model from the marketplace was also not an option for a few reasons:

• since we’re talking about a monster model for a horror game where the story is heavily tied to the monster, it just feels wrong to use an unoriginal model
• good quality models with a proper license cost a lot
• scams… scams everywhere. The last straw for me was when I was shopping for some animations and I saw a guy selling “animation packs” that were taken from Mixamo. I don’t need a headache like this…

Process

Software

My go-to 3D software had been Blender for a few years now. I used to work in Maya in my university years, but I switched when version 2.8 was released. Fortunately, Blender has a really nice sculpting features that were perfect for a noob like me.

Design

When deciding on the design, I mostly thought about what stuff creeps me out. I think it’s a good moment to admit that I am a terrible chicken and I don’t handle scary things very well. On the other hand, what I consider scary often doesn’t align with what is considered scary by mainstream audiences.

One of the things I strongly disagree with is treating “gross” and “scary” as synonyms. Personally, I think that those 2 feelings are completely different from each other and just because I’m grossed out by something doesn’t mean I’m scared of it.

To put it simply: being scared means I’m gonna turn on all of the lights at home whenever I have to get up an use the toilet in the middle of the night, while being grossed out means I will feel nauseous whenever I look at food for a bit. The former will cause my heart to beat faster, the latter will just make me annoyed.

I wanted to avoid any body horror and grossness so instead I went in a direction of uncanny proportions and an almost-human-but-not-really kind of vibe. Remembering how creeped out I was playing The Witcher 3 Hearts of Stone DLC and encountering The Caretaker for the first time, I also wanted to make “WhiP” monster faceless. Wendigos and Slenderman were also heavy influences.

Reference

I had an idea about how the monster would look like, so at least I didn’t have to worry about coming up with a concept for it. To make it easier to visualize, I made some simple sketches that I didn’t even finish properly (I regret it slightly).

To have a starting point, I made 2 reference images: one in T-pose and one from the side. I imported them into Blender and used them as a reference images for blocking out shapes.

Sculpting

After blocking out the basic form, I added a multiresolution modifier and subdivided the model a few times. I went into sculpting mode, turned on the mirror sculpting option, and started creating the big shapes first.

I was using my Huion tablet to sculpt all the details, which made things a lot easier. I can’t imagine doing all that with a mouse. Maybe for smaller and simpler models it wouldn’t be such a big deal, but for working on complex stuff a graphic tablet is a requirement.

After having all the necessary muscle shapes and bone structure and other “landmarks” done, I went into adding some finer detail like creases and veins.

Retopology

Once I finished sculpting all the details that I wanted (which turned out to be quite a pleasant process), it was time for my favorite (not really) part – retopology. I had done it multiple times in the past and every single time it was a chore. It’s just not my thing. Here it’s even worse, because I’m dealing with organic shapes and not a nice blocky hard surface model.

Sadly for me, this part is probably the most important as it will affect the way the model deforms in animations and how the textures will look. So without having much other choice, I went on a retopology tutorial marathon. I looked at reference images, and read forum discussions and articles. Anything to make sure I don’t have to go through this again because I messed up some part of the body.

I decided to support myself with a few Blender addons, the most important ones being bSurface and Loop Tools, to make my life easier. And then it was just a slow process of working through the entire model.

It ended up better than I expected and I didn’t need to redo anything as I was careful to fix any issues as I go. Don’t take me wrong, it’s nowhere near perfect, but after doing some testing it seems like it will work just fine for my needs.

At the end I used smooth modifier, to even out and smooth out the grid.

Baking normal map

At this point I really wanted to have baking normals out of the way, as in the past I often struggled with achieving good results.

Normally I use Substance Painter to bake my maps, because I could never get Blender baking to work properly. This time though I decided to finally figure this out, just so I can have an alternative to SP.

I again went on a tutorial spree.

It ended up being easier than expected, and after preparing a proper cage for the bake it went very smoothly. I simply duplicated the low poly model and then added shrinkwrap modifier with snap mode “above surface” to wrap the cage around my high poly model. Then in sculpt mode I used the inflate tool to make sure it covers the entire high poly model without any overlapping.

I think I might start doing all the baking in Blender now. It ended up being much faster and easier than Substance Painter.

Next steps

After making sure there’s no issue with normal maps, I finished the inside of the mouth and rigged the model. As much as there were no issues with the body rig, the face on the other hand gave me some trouble due to specific shape of the monster’s mouth. Fortunately, everything seems to be working now.

Now all that’s left is to prepare animations. I am planning to use some available on Mixamo and then make custom ones for specific use.

I will also texture the model in Substance Painter and prepare any required materials in Substance Designer (if needed).

Outro

Whenever I write one of these devlogs, I have a really hard time deciding what I can tell or show and what not so I don’t spoil too much. I think I might just wait until the game is released and then go into details on how the process went. If I do, I will probably just post it on this blog. I might make a YouTube channel for everything that would work better as a video, too.