First character incorporating insect parts and body horror elements.

WallaceGazaway

Around a month back I had begun work on a creature concept centered around the idea of being a new life form built from melding animal and human DNA in a warped sort of cloning or mass-production process in a sci-fi environment. 


The high poly sculpt and WIP renders of the time had come out much better than anticipated, and I am now happily tackling the low poly retopo at a comfortable pace and have as of now reach the UV phase.

There are admittedly some points in the retopo phase where I almost regretted such an undertaking in getting a topology that can work with a design utilizing multiple mouths in nontraditional places framed against contrasting body parts, as well as pronounced nails and claws, but overall I'm glad I pushed through while managing to isolate most of the dense topology to spots that need it, and making it more sparing in places that would have minimal movement or stretching. 



Hoping to continue this pace going forward and be able to show off the final product with the high poly bake and texture maps built in substance one I tackle the UVs for this monster model.

Eric Chadwick

What references are you examining while you work? It would help to share those here, to get a sense of where you're headed, and what needs more work. Good reference is essential, even with a "fantasy" kind of character. Because it's all relatable, so it needs to hit those key points of reference.

WallaceGazaway

Yes, sorry. I had actually accumulated a bunch of references for this design but had mostly placed them all within a folder rather than create a mood board for it due in part to the large number I'd gathered and the fact some of them were models themselves that I simply used as a means to view the subject matter from varying angles and to see how others approached similar subjects, or just to see details that were hard to pick up based on the images I'd found. I could however try finding and gathering some of those images into a mood board and posting them.

For the insect portions, I had actually studied multiple different beetle types to gauge which structure most interested me, but much of it is based more on stag beetles due to their 3-segment build, though elements of rhino beetle were considered as well due to the morphed human-like element could be seen as a warped form of the rhino beetle's large frontal horn. The warped human sections I looked at other examples of human deformation types of body horror but a major source I found helpful was sculpts of The Thing.

I'd actually used those insect images and turnarounds, as well as body horror examples, to drastically change some of the proportions and especially elements of the insect body compared to the initial sketch.

zetheros

it reminds me of some anime / studio ghibli work

WallaceGazaway

@zetheros Now that you mention Ghibli, I guess one character I might have thought of without realizing might have been the form No-Face took in Spirited away after being corrupted by the bathhouse, because of his small mask face juxtaposed on a morphed monster body with human-like appendages and large mouths.

For the most part, I've seen others compare the design to something they might have seen in Berserk or Claymore, but funny enough some major inspirations for the sort of setting I could envision something like this living in included stuff like Letter Bee (because of the beetle motif and living in a decayed world), Made in Abyss, and Ergo Proxy. Though none of those had anything I directly used as inspiration, more so stuff I thought of alongside something like Bloodborne for ideas for monster designs.

Eric Chadwick

I think the blank face on the tip could be more freaky/scary. So blank at the moment. Maybe some asymmetry, or scarring, or stitches across the mouth, etc.

WallaceGazaway

@Eric Chadwick In most cases I would agree, but I'd actually intended to have only the eye portions of the face have visible flesh, as the rest is meant to be encased fully in the insect shell, contoured so much around it that it forms the details of the face structure under it.

Because of this, the face being overly blank or smooth was actually somewhat intentional, as it's meant to be encased and I intended for the eyes and the uncanniness of the imprint of a human like face on something not human to do the heavy lifting in the design. Though I did also have the idea to try something for the flesh around the eyes once I bring it into substance, such as scarring, generally sickly-looking skin, or even unnatural wrinkles or stretching around the eyes due to being pulled on by the shell circling it.

Though I do get what you mean. If it hadn't been for the intention, I would have probably gone for more detail on the face or asymmetry and scarring, but in the case of this model I'd actually done the opposite and deliberately smoothed out finer details at that specific spot.

I'm also realizing that the particular renders and screenshots I'd picked do a bad job of showing particular segments of the neck and face are covered by smoother portions of body that juts out from the rest to show it grows over the flesh. Hopefully that will be better conveyed with stark color difference and texture variety and better camera angles or lighting. One approach I could see melding the idea to give more variety that I might consider though is visible cracks along parts of the casing growing over the fleshy bits, maybe as if it's overgrowing and beginning to break through the insect parts, since the DNA isn't mean to be mixing perfectly or right at all.

Fabi_G

Hi! Got to say, I can't quite imagine the gameplay/ behaviour/ attacks of that creature. Mouths seem to be placed at inconvenient locations. If you have ideas there, curious to see them.

WallaceGazaway

@Fabi_G I worried about that as well later into designing it honestly. An idea I had that might work for it is that it could use the opening and closing of the mouths across the back of its neck to aid in bending it, opening them and shifting them left or right similar to how we shift our jaws to allow freedom of movement sort of like a more restricted giraffe neck.

The idea would also be that the enemy isn't as quick to react in close quarters and is more a threat due to being able to cover ground quickly or use its size and weight as a weapon. The locations of the mouths are more to make up for the limited frame of movement on the body at the front due to the casing by allowing it to bite/eat without moving simply by opening its mouth and biting something if it tries to climb along it or make use of blind spots. Though that also would mean the other mouths would be treated more like a deformity rather than an actually useful form of attack outside of the large frontal mouth that has the two arms close to it.