The design for my creature took a lot longer than I would have liked. The reason for this was that I was uninspired and didn’t speak to me. I also took some points of the brief too literally. Initially I decided to make a quadrupedal animal, an animal that lived deep within snowy terrain and thrived in sub-zero temperature. I spent time researching different animals and how they survived in harsh conditions. These sketches were my final result:
The more and more I thought about the pipeline and process, the more I became disillusioned toward my piece. It was boring and felt too hard-coded in reality as it already resembled a pre-existing animal, a sabretooth tiger. I began to think harder. I sat down and began to doodle, instead of thinking of what would make the coolest design visually, I thought of a story that would drive the physical aspects instead of writing a story after the design.
I looked into folklore, history, and mythologies. This is where I sparked an Idea that stuck. I was reminded of King Arthur and the sword in the stone, Excalibur. After this spark of creativity I began writing notes, and the final idea struck: What if the stone that hosts Excalibur was a beast that guards it?
This is where I introduce the Cairnbrax.
A beast made to bear the burden of the sword of Excalibur, wandering aimlessly through nature. It’s rugged, hard, rock-like skin makes it feel blended into its environment, yet excluded as its hunched gargoyle stance haunts the slim passages between trees.
There have been many to hunt the Cairnbrax lured by the power of Excalibur. Yet through the passage of time, history has blurred the true capabilities of the sword, and the Cairnbrax’s Origins. The most wide-spread and told story is that the last true wielder of Excalibur, Arthur, was betrayed by his own, slain for his impertinence with his own weapon. Enraged by Arthur’s failure, Excalibur refused to lie dormant. It corrupted Arthur, melding his skin with earth and rock until he lost all recollection of his humanity, constraining him to become the stone that Excalibur will one day be pulled from, ready for its most worthy soldier.
I wanted my beast to capture the feeling of an old folklore, with a dark medieval feeling. When I moved onto the drawing and designing aspect I was more loose, less worried about specifics and more driven to design a beast with the story I had just written. This was my initial Cairnbrax sketch:
Whilst I am happy with the design, I think there are still some things to be desired. For instance, I think I could have pushed the ‘rock’ narrative a little more instead of mostly focussing on the fact the beast used to be man. I also should have made it more scary or eerie, by pushing its anatomy and researching deeper in what designs make you uneasy and why.
Speaking of research, whilst designing my creature I used a multitude of references and inspiration. I compiled the images using pureref. This was a key feature in the design as it allowed me to transform other designs into my own. An example of what was this picture in particular:
I loved how the feet looked, and you can see that within my final sketch as its feet are rounded much like the reference.
An example of what wasn’t utilized within my original design was this:
As the ‘steam-punk’ aesthetic was directly contradicting the medieval/folklore vibe I was aiming for. The only thing that aided in the design process was the pose the character was giving.
I moved onto making the profiles for my reference within Blender. The main difference between the two is that I pushed my character to be standing upright. I was taking a lot of inspiration from gargoyles and noticed that many, if not most were always standing upright, hunched over on themselves. These were the sketches of my Profiles ready for blender:
To inform myself on what exactly a block out was and why it was useful, I turned to Youtube. I looked into other peoples processes and pipelines and why the block out step was important. This was the link I used:
My main takeaway from this video was that the blockout is the most important step during this process, as it is the foundation that everything else is applied to. With this in mind I began to do my own blockout. Here are my blockout images:
The primary forms that I wanted to capture in my blockout were the muscle groups. You can see this the best in the abdominal area as it has its own mesh to work off from. Looking back to this step I would have added secondary forms in this part too, taking it a step further to add block’s of smaller muscles on top of the primary forms. This would have made it easier to sculpt further down the line. An example of what I’m talking about is in the legs.
Just like in the image above, I would have added more mesh for the quads and other individual muscles. This small misstep made it harder to carve, add depth, and detail later on in the sculpting stage.
Despite that, I moved onto the sculpting portion of my process. This was the most enticing and fun part, as it’s the stage where you really start to see your work manifest and pay off.
I gathered references a little differently than I had before. This time, I sculpted and searched for references simultaneously. The reason for this was to narrow my search more efficiently, as when I encountered a roadblock in my sculpt (e.g, muscles, anatomy etc.), I could then hop onto Pinterest and search for that specific issue I am encountering and find the most applicable reference.
The majority of my references were anatomical, I really enjoy studying musculature and structure, so not only was I sculpting for this project, but also my own enjoyment which really aided in keeping my attention. Once again using pureref to help me, These were some of my most prominent references throughout my sculpt:
The last particular reference was the most helpful, as it showed you how the muscles throughout the back would stretch and expand, and given my beats posture is in a hunched forward position I would have to sculpt the back to reflect that fact.
To help me start I turned to Youtube to help me remesh my blockout, this was the video I used:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iveM_C6cenA&t=21s
The first passthrough of my sculpt looked like this:
I was very proud of the detail I managed to show through despite not adding secondary forms to my blockout, but without realising I had created an issue that impacted my overall outcome down the line. This was a very good teaching point in my experience, as it showed me how important the foundation is. I later learned that this error could have been avoided if I had blocked out my beast in a T-pose rather than a relaxed one.
The issue I am talking about is the fingers
I hadn’t realised it at the time, but the remesh had caused the fingers to merge between the base. This small oversight caused my model to have joining fingers until the very end. I did attempt to remove the mesh itself, but was unable to.
In the second and final pass of the sculpt I came to a decision to remove it’s eyes and replace them with deep scars. The reason for the sudden change was that I didn’t like the look of the eyes I had originally designed down the line, as I felt it took away from the gargoyle inspired look I was going for. I also felt inclined to do this as it further cements that this beast looks like a rock but bleeds like a man.
This was the result of my second pass-through of my sculpt:
This was the point where I had realised my mistake in the remesh section, and now the hands were conjoined. It wasn’t a horrible mistake however, as it could be passed off as unrefined stone, but it wasn’t true to my vision and came from an unintended mistake. At this point I was running low on time and couldn’t redo this section, so I continued and moved onto Retopology.
To begin with Retopology, I began to work on the provided exercise Blend file. It was very helpful in understanding how to control the flow of topology. Here are some screenshots of that exercise:
Retopologizing my model felt daunting at first, but after refreshing myself on Blackboard from last year, I felt more confident to start. Just like before I still needed some reference to help me understand where the topology and loops needed to flow. Luckily, I came across a sketchfab link of someone’s retopology of the human form. This was perfect for me to see all angles and follow along.
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/biped-male-topology-study-8695481319684cd48fee33a30b9a197f
I began my retopology and it resulted in this:
Managing to get the loops to flow the way you wanted felt very satisfying. As you’ll notice however, I didn’t finish the retopology. This was due to time constraints. I didn’t realise how much time I would spend troubleshooting and researching throughout this project, and that impacted my scheduling.
To speed up this process, I used Zbrush to speed up and retopologize for me. This isn’t something I would have liked to do, as I could see blaring inconsistencies and poor topology through the mesh. I probably could have looked further into how I can tell Zbrush to create the groups better for me, but I was already behind and wanted to move onto the next step as fast as I could. I also utilized Zbrush to unwrap my model.
After baking the high-res model onto the low-res, I made a rig for my beast. It was easy thanks to the content provided on Blackboard. With another quick refresh I made my armature and posed my beast. To hide the conjoined mesh on the fingers, I angled it’s hands in a way that would conceal the flaw in the render.
Texturing has always been one of my favourite parts of modelling, and with substance painter. I made the base layer a leather texture with a rock texture overtop with Multiple set to around 50% opacity. I did this to capture that ‘stone-skin’ feeling I wanted. After that, I painted on “pebbles” over the surface to accentuate the rock feeling. From there, I used smart masks and materials to add dirt into the crevices and moss on the highest points of the beast.
I had attempted to add free user-made assets into substance, but I kept getting an error that I couldn’t find a fix for, so instead I had to resort to making my own moss by layering two different colours of moss on top of each other. This was the substance final result:
After taking it back into blender and correctly applying the textures to my model, this is what it turned out like:
I wish I could have added more wear to the textures, scratches and imperfections throughout to really push that feeling of an aged, weathered beast made of stone.
Creating a landscape in Unreal was intimidating at first. It takes a lot of dedication and focus to learn a new program, but I was determined to get started on it nonetheless. Throughout my work I used Youtube a lot to help me understand what to do and why I should do it in that way. These were the links that helped me a lot in this process:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY8AtjM2Jxg
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/grass-quick-start-in-unreal-engine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiGHyDbQW-A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zy5oMXuO04
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSsOS6M2u1s
I modelled the landscape by hand using the aforementioned videos.
To start I created a new map within unreal and deleted the default landscape. I then went into Landscape mode and made a new plane that was 7×7 quads. I spent some time sculpting and terraforming the terrain. I Already had an idea of what I wanted, that being a dense forest for where the Cairnbrax resides. With this in mind, I made sure to make the terrain hilly as opposed to mountainous.
The next step was to paint the terrain. I took to Quixel in order to search for the appropriate resources. I created a new material in the content drawer and closely followed one of the Youtube videos shown prior. The video in question showed me how to use ‘Landscape Layer Blend’ nodes.
Once the painting was all done I went into Foliage mode and messed around with the settings until I achieved the desired result. After painting the area with Foliage I found some Tree asset’s off Quixel and began to make my forest ready for my scene.
Circling back around to Blackboard I used the tutorials provided to help me import my beast into the scene. At this point Unreal still felt alien to me, but I was determined to push for the final step. The main issue I faced was trying to import the Fbx into unreal with it’s textures. My first attempt was trying to import it as a glTF file, as I had seen that it’s the easiest way to transfer both the models and textures at once. However, when imported all the textures were dark and not like they were in Blender. So, I was forced to ditch that idea and move onto Importing the Fbx file and textures separately and plugging them in manually. Soon I realised that I had encountered another problem. That being that there is no ‘bump’ node that allows you to use a height map in unreal 5.
I googled countless methods, from using parallaxes to the ‘NormalFromHeightMap’ but nothing worked. I was truly stumped. Eventually I came across this tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV73LifbmaA
It wasn’t helping at all, and just as I was about to keep up my search it started talking about Substance painter. Lucky for me, I still had access to my substance files so I followed along. What I had learned in 30 seconds absolved me of all my problems from the past hour of troubleshooting. The key thing that was going wrong for me was the fact that I had exported the textures from Substance ready for Blender instead of Unreal Engine. To fix this all I had to do was convert my Exporting options from the standard to ‘Unreal 4 (packed)’. What this does is that it hides the AO, Metallic, and Rough all within the same Linear colour texture. It also bakes the Height map into the Normal.
Now all I had to do was to simply plug each respective colour into its respective slot and it all worked perfectly. It was admittedly frustrating to have such a big problem fixed so simply, and I was lucky to have found one brief moment near the end of a tutorial to explain it to me.
These were the rendered results of Unreal:
Overall, I really love the final and overall outcome of my work. Even though there were tough hurdles to jump such as missing time, inconsistencies, and missed mistakes that turned sour down the line, I really loved working on this project. The story of my beast is something I’m particularly proud of, as I haven’t had any form of creative spark in that aspect in a very long time and it was nice to fine-tune details and story to my liking. Not only was that amazing, but watching my story and design come to fruition has definitely made all the trials and tribulations worth it.
I have learned a lot in terms of the pipeline’s and amount of time and effort it takes to create a character from scratch. If I was to redo this project again with my current knowledge there is so much I could change and improve on, for instance, I would have included those secondary forms and accounted for the mesh to merch in the tighter and smaller areas. I also learned how complex Unreal Engine is, and how much knowledge it takes to navigate the program intuitively. The program itself can be overwhelming, especially to a person who has barely approached a game engine. Despite this I will stay determined to continue my journey with unreal, and keep pushing through even when it becomes too much to understand.