Upon getting the brief for this semester’s project I automatically knew that I wanted to make a character that felt like he fit on the more creepy or Halloween aesthetic as it is something that I really wanted to try out for my project. When I first started considering what I could do for my project my mind automatically jumped to an idea I had a long time ago for a character I had thought about while doing a challenge in a game I had played over the summer before the start of my second year. The challenge I had been doing was one that was called “Wilted Willow” challenge which I got the idea for the challenge from a YouTube series following the same challenge in the same game. While going through this challenge I had my own interpretation of how I pictured the cats behind the curse and I thought that this could be a very good chance for me to solidify my idea for the cats in this challenge. I sketched out a basic idea’s page in Krita just to jot down a few concept ideas for what I could do and from an early stage of the project I knew that I was set on creating a cat based character.
As we were told about the expressions eyes could have on a character and how characters with no pupils or seemingly no eyes at all could make a character appear more scary and ominous due to our natural instinct to look to the eyes of anything for the personality. When we don’t have the ability to see these eyes it unsettles us and that was the sort of feeling I wanted to get for my creature. Due to this I chose to remove his eyes and due to the unsettling nature that comes from dripping facial features I also wanted to give him a leaking/crying like feature to his eyes to further add to this creepy unsettling feeling I could give to him. This idea came to me due to characters such as the ink demon from the
game “Bendy and the ink machine” who takes on very dripping like facial features near the end of the game, Another example of a character that has this crying look is a the crying child sprite from the “Five Nights at Freddy’s” game franchise which is also enforced with the marionette from the same series, both of which have a very creepy and unsettling feeling associated with them due to the no eyes and “crying” like look both character’s sport. After we learned about blocking out in class with the basic quadruped model our lecturer showed us during class, instead of trying to shape the model to look more like a horse during the activity I reshaped it to appear more cat like as I knew that when I would be starting on making my character I knew that I wanted this character to be a feline. Following his activity I also looked up a few images on the internet of real life cat skulls so that I could get the basic understanding of what basic shape I could use to build my character in a way which would make it appear more like a feline.
As I started to think much more about how I wanted the character to look I found that I was most interested in making the character an anthropomorphic cat as I felt it could look more interesting and allow for more expression in the model with the potential of showing a human like ribcage to the upper-body in order to make him appear much more unsettling as it will cause him to look more like he is undead and having the visible ribs make it seem as though he is starving or had starved to death at some point. I also found that I wanted to give him an optional mouth which could appear when he is hungry, once again making it have that drippy appearance like the mouth is forming from the skin itself which is almost melting apart, the idea for this kind of mouth comes from characters such as Venom from “Marvel” for the wide unsettling grin that forms when he is hungry. As stated before however I wanted to make his mouth be optional as I also enjoyed the look of the mouthless look as a passive form of him.
As I drew more and more concepts of him,
I started to add a bell to the base of his neck which I started to consider a way for the character to communicate, as the majority of the time he does not possess a mouth and so I did want to supply a way for him to communicate when he doesn’t have his mouth. Personally I found it creepy to imagine that the only noise he actually makes is the soft faint jingling of the bell on his neck, not even having the sound of footsteps following him due to him being a declawed cat who had passed away via starvation.
At this point I had started to reconsider the background behind the character now as I had started to drift quite far from the initial “Starved kitten spirit in the forest” that I had originally started with at the beginning and as I sat down to consider where the design had gotten to by now, I slowly realised that the character would likely fit into a laboratory experiment gone wrong or entity containment setting and due to his ghost like appearance and mute personality he had adapted I found that I had actually began to look at old haunted mirror games many teens and preteens often find and try out during their curious phase when they get intrigued and fascinated by the supernatural. Some examples of the games I am trying to explain are the likes of “The Bloody Mary”, “The Candy Man”, “Blue Baby/Baby Blu” etc. all of these games somewhat encouraged me to come up with the narrative that this character was a creature that can be summoned through a mirror game and I even got more inspiration from the TV series “Supernatural” who actually had a video dedicated to their own take of the Bloody Mary game which introduced a spirit who could travel through mirrors via people playing the game related to it and once summoned the spirit would then kill those she found that felt guilty over a death they blamed themselves over.
My friend also sat down with me to talk about more details I could include in his story such as him being captured by the government due to a national security risk he posed and as his name is related to the game used to summon him, all records of his real name is now censored or Redacted and that is where his name then stemmed from. The idea for this new environment mostly stemmed from the “SPC Containment Breach” which had been discussed a lot online as it was a relatively new thing people had began to grow borderline obsessed with and as such this has where I landed with my idea for the environment I was going to be putting my creature into.
Finally I started on blocking out the basic outline of Redacted into blender after learning how to during the blocking out activity we did with the basic quadruped block out and due to his bipedal form I used a lot squares to lay out the shape of him.
I had also seen videos on YouTube of people creating digitigrade characters in Blender which helped me to come up with a way to create a solid base/Stage zero to start from so that I could work on sculpting and smoothing during stage one of my model sculpting.
One video that inspired me on how to make a digitigrade model is this one by Youtuber RoseRedTiger.
When I finished the blocking out and managed to get it to a place that I was happy with, I then took him out of the object mode and into sculpt mode to start smoothing the many shapes I had used to create his blocking out. That is what I considered the first move from stage zero to stage one.
This was the first I started to see him coming together and looking somewhat like a real animal like how I wanted him to look.
Around this first pass I didn’t find the model too hard to get to look smooth enough that I can see how he would begin to look when I was able to get him closer and closer to his final form.
After smoothing everything out that I had worked on from the blocking, I then moved to carving and sculpting more of the finer details I want to have be noticeable in the final iteration of Redacted’s model.
This is the stage which I started to see that he really began to look the way I wanted him to with his rib details, his eye’s outlined now, his eats and head profile now looking much more feline like. all of it looked exactly how I wanted him to as well as leaving enough room for the details to be further refined after I had retopologized him to lower the poly count for when I would be posing him with a new armature. Originally I found it difficult in order to get his topology to look clean and overall I believe there might also be a few areas of the topology that may really cause issues that I
wasn’t able to fix on my passes of the model that I personally did and when I have more time to sit down and work on making more models possibly over the summer etc. I believe I may be able to find these areas more thoroughly and be able to work out fixes for them quicker and more confidently the more I practice doing it.
In this pass of the stages I also started to add the eyes and bell planes/spheres so that I could work on this file more. It took me a long time to figure out how to fix some of the big topology issues I was facing I actually had one of the lecturers sit down to me and show me how I could use the smooth tool in the sculpt mode with the surface setting on to actually use it to fix and smooth of parts of the topology which were too close together and was causing a lot of issues in my opinion and once I tried this method of smoothing the topology out I realised it really helped a lot with me and when it came to using the multi-res modifier to sculpt his ribs, spine and other finer details onto him I did find it a little difficult to figure out how I could bake his new details into a map to use for his model but it didn’t really cause too much issues. Being honest I don’t really know how I got everything to work out but I managed to somehow get it to work through a lot of button pressing and fiddling in Blender?
I managed to do the uv mapping on him and managed to get his model out into substance painter where I went through a bunch of versions as I worked on trying to fix a few technical hiccups with it and when I found the colours that I wanted to use for him in a different app I have in my own phone where I could then colour pick the exact colours and read the exact RGB values of the colours in order to change the colours of the textures I wanted to use in substance painter when I moved the model into this software.
I used the felt material on his body as well as the gold metal material on his bell then there is another premade material on his eyes which I altered a lot to make it look much more like how I had pictured redacted to look.
I also found a leaking texture on the alpha masks in substance which I used to add his crying stained look he always has in the art and concept sketches I made for him. At this point I had started to see him coming together the way I had originally pictured him to be in all of the times I had created concept art and proper coloured art of the character.
Getting Redacted into unreal engine was a little confusing at first as I had no idea what I was doing but through a lot of googling and research into what I was doing, looking up step by steps for everything, I eventually got him into unreal and so began the construction of the “laboratory” room that I was intent on having Redacted be pictured in for the unreal engine screenshot we are ultimately working towards having by the submission date.
I had opened the software Quixel Mixer to make textures for both the walls and floors and upon inspection I realised, not a lot of the textures on it actually appeared as though they fit a laboratory aesthetic and while I tried my best to find textures that I felt conveyed the padded entity containment room I wanted to have, I struggled to find items in the unreal asset library that conveyed that crucial feel of a laboratory that I wanted to have for my screenshot and while I really wanted to have this aesthetic so badly, since I had left the actual construction of the room to the last minute I concluded that even if the scenery didn’t convey the feel I wanted it to have as long as it still felt ominous and looked interesting enough that it could be an actual place that exists, I would be happy enough with that for the submission.
I managed to find a flat cardboard box that added to the floor, making the room appear much more warn down and messy, I also added a lot of cushions around the room to make it appear as though Redacted had either found them and has been gathering them enough stack around so he could sit on them more comfortably as I had concluded a long time ago that I didn’t think Redacted would walk or even stand up very often due to the pain he would experience due to being declawed. I found a wooden shelf object on the 3d asset library that I thought could be added to give the room more dimension and add areas that I could put more things onto. The wooden basket in the back corner I used to make that area look less bare as beforehand I felt that corner looked too bare and didn’t look right to me. Finally since I knew I wanted my area to be a room that was basically just a black out box, I knew I needed to add some form of light so that you could actually see the character and so with the knowledge I gained from our lecturer when he was teaching us about how to make glowing materials in unreal, I decided to make a long light to put on the ceiling which could light the room up bright enough to make things visible enough, now thinking bad I guess I could have darkened it more to create a more horror like feel to him.
In conclusion to my project, I would say I have learnt a lot more about character modelling than I thought I had while doing the project last year with my kitsune character Dez I made. Over this first semester project I found that I REALLY enjoy sculpting the characters and with a lot of tips and tricks that I have learnt this semester that help on the creation from so much as the start to even the retopology stages was just extremely great and I found this this time I felt as though it was much easier to get a decently detailed looking character. I feel as though texturing for Redacted also went fairly well despite how many different times I tried it and couldn’t get it to look well… I still found I enjoyed it when I actually did figure out how to work out what was causing the issues for me.
In my own opinion I know that I do need to work more on trying to use retopology and with much more practice on making other models when I do have free time to myself I feel as though I can eventually figure out how to do the retopology more effectively and maybe even professionally. The armature also gave me quite a few issues with weight painting and what not and even in the final product I feel that his pose could have been so much more fluid if I had more time to learn properly and really REALLY try to find out for myself how to fix the movement of my character. The posing issues I also believe stemmed mostly from the topology mistakes I had made while making him and if I could have fixed them then I believe I wouldn’t have struggled as much with the armature deforming the mesh too much.
overall I feel like with the stress of working in my job over the weekends and trying to juggle both modules really left me exhausted and I wasn’t able to utilise my time the way I needed to or wanted to. If I could go back and do it again, I would have tried to manage my time a lot more effectively and wouldn’t have left myself with barely any time left to do both of my submissions, especially when writing is concerned.
{word Count: 3000}