29/11/23 - Monster Design

In today's lesson, I was continuing to create the monster model on Blender.

I started by creating a pelvis resembling bone , which I made by first adding in a new circle mesh, filling in it's face, and moving around it's different vertices, to try and curve around at the front, and curl around into a rounded back. I then placed this at the bottom of the spine. I felt that this made the pelvis sit too low on the body, so I cut down the length of the spine, and also adjusted it's curvature to be lesser, as I felt that the pelvis was sitting very far forward in comparison to the ribs.

I then duplicated the arms and hands, re-scaling them to be longer and thicker, to create the legs for the monster. I added in and scaled down an new UV-Sphere mesh as well, to create a leg socket joint, which I then duplicated and placed one above each leg, to connect it closely to the pelvis gaps. I also rotated the legs, as although initially I made them straight, I felt that they would look better if the knee joint area would be slightly bent. I also resized the ribcage to be slightly narrower, as I felt that it was too wide in comparison to the rest of the body.

After this, I watched a YouTube video on how to add basic rigging to Blender models, which I tried to follow along with, however I felt that with how long we've got left to finish the game, the rigging aspect was going to take longer than we had. I talked this over with my team, and they agreed to just keep it without rigging, as animation could be added to it within Unreal itself. 

Because I had finished on the main body, I then moved on to working on the design of the facial features. I wanted to create indentations into the head to create eye socket holes, and a missing nose and mouth, however after trying multiple different ways of doing this; including using the knife tool to carve out an eye shape, and extruding the faces into the head, as well as using the sculpting tools with my drawing tablet to sink into the head, I felt that neither of these methods were producing the look that I was trying to achieve, so I decided to try adding in a new circle mesh and sizing it right down, duplicating it, and then rotating both of these shapes, to fit the curve of the head to look like eyes.

I then duplicated these eye meshes, and resized them, moving them closer together and slightly lower down than the eyes, to create nostril holes, and then also duplicated these again, lining them up and duplicating a few times, to create a row of teeth, which I then curved down at each end slightly, so that the mouth wasn't a dead-straight line, as mouth's aren't that shape.

I personally felt that this face looked slightly too cute for our horror game character, but after talking to my teammates about it, we decided that it would be okay. However, Spike did ask me if I could add some vines and extra items around the body to add a bit more character to it, so that's what I started on next.

As the class was over, I carried on working on this design at home. I created the vines, by using the same technique that I used to create the start of the barbs of my barbed wire, and set them to twist around one upper arm, and the opposite full leg. I then added a green material to this, to represent vines more.

As I was showing this change to the rest of the group, Spike had looked into how to alter the face to make it look a bit scarier to fit the theme of the game a little bit more. He sent through some reference images, and so I tried my best to take inspiration from these images and recreate the face of the monster, to be scarier.

To do this, I added in a new circle mesh, deleted some of the top vertices, reconnected the end two, to have a diagonal straight line at the top, filled this new shape in, and then duplicated this, flipping it 180 degrees, to form two eyes, and coloured these black. I still used the same nose design from before, and then for the mouth, added in multiple circle meshes, reshaping these to form a long thin oval mouth, with a larger rounder section at the bottom, and a stitch effect on the sides. The group agreed that this was a much better look for the monster, and Spike also suggested adding red dots into the eyes, so I added those in as well, and I think it has ended up looking quite good.