Garden Spider - Character Design, BUAS 2018
For a second year school project, we were tasked to work together in teams to create a game in eight weeks. I chose to be on the project that would make a boss-fighting game. On this project, I took up the task of creating the creature the protagonists would be fighting.
The setting and theme for our game ended up being a rural backyard, where a group of small humanoids would have to protect their land from a chimera-like monster created from different materials.
An attack animation as used in-game. It shows the flaring of the flower petals and conveys some of the weighty movements of the creature. Animations made by Levi Bosman, and the creature rig by Thomas Vijge.
The final look for the spider, as it looked in-game.
First step: Shape and posture exploration with silhouettes
Based on some of the silhouettes, I could already make some rough sketches.
This monster concept was made solely focusing on intergrating organic material.
This creature got the opposite treatment, putting as much focus in adding man-made material as possible.
This monster looks slow and hard to damage, which didn't work for the first monster we had in mind. We wanted something quick.
Around this point, I was asked to intergrate platforms onto the monster, to allow vertical gameplay.
A cleanup of a previous sketch that proved to be popular. In the end we chose to continue with this.
The rear of the spider was redesigned slightly, with the original flower making way for an artichoke.
Zbrush was used to create a rough blockout that was then cleaned up in Maya, the result of which is shown above.
The texturing was done in Substance Painter, and we created three distinct colourations for the different difficulty stages of the creature.