Hi hi, it is time for another devlog. First of all I would like to tell you the good news that we finally decide on the official name of our game: drum roll From now on it shall be known as Eternal Damnation, so going forward from here project one will be officially referred to with that name.
Don’t forget to join our discord server here. Our discord server is the best place to talk to other community members and give us direct feedback for our game.
Person behind all this cool work
Todays focus will be on our playable character and the future of their look and since I’m not the one who worked on it I would like to introduce you all to our main 3D artist and over all a very cool guy Andy. So I will hand him over the rest of the devlog and let him tell you more about the whole process!
Hi everyone, I’m Andy, originally from a small town in North West England, I moved to Nottingham to join the SD Games development team in the middle of February. I like old cameras, music, and long walks on the beach. As the 3D artist on the team my duties include the editing and creation of 3D assets and animations. This is the process of the creation of one of our player character models, from the initial asset(s) to the finished character.
The Arachne - our spider-human hybrid
Initially we were going to use the Darkness Spider by Protofactor Inc., but the initial asset didn’t feel monstrous enough, so spikes were added. We then realised that, logically, the player character’s appearance would make it impossible to interact with NPC’s without them running in fear, as well as hard to connect emotionally (an issue that may exist for the player too).
We decided we were going to combine humanoid and monster elements to create a character that would be able to communicate with neutral NPCs whilst retaining certain barriers; this also allows for combinations of playstyles from how the player chooses to upgrade either half of their being.
Spider assets from Infinity PBR and Superhero(ine) assets by Alex Lashko were used as a starting point to create the character. I needed to create a custom body for the spider that could act as a bridge between the spider and human bodies. After sculpting the body in Zbrush, I felt like it needed something else to help connect the bodies, so made a 2D pattern that I wrapped around the mesh and then made 3D and sculpted to shape.
(The sculpted bodies and connector)
The issue we ran into then was that the original textures were low resolution and didn’t look good close up on camera. So we had the idea to use an ai image upscaler to increase the resolution mutlitple time and produce a much more crisp final look.
(emi: you might also notice that we used this image for the new cover of our website)
Eventually we created a scene to give more context and I posed the character then lit everything before we rendered layers out and compositied the shot together.
The future of the character
Obviously we also want to provide the player with several options of their starting monstrous hybrid so Im already starting work on a scorpion based look.