Hi there! This is the next pack of characters in the pipe. Some nice “were” creatures to populate your heroic fantasy project or even some other genre. This pack should include: Werecrab, werefish, werehog, weretoad, weresquid, weresnake, wererhino and werecroc.
This pack will have Legacy and PBR support as well as on place and root motion animations.
The pack gathering multiple models will be created once 3 of these would be done. As usual upon each new released Add-On the price of the pack will go up until the last Add-On is done.
Since they are lycanthrope creatures will they also have full body morphability back into human form? Just kidding.
Nice concept for your pack, and interesting selections for the types of were creatures.
They are “were” creatures. A Lycanthrope means literally lycos : wolf and antropos: human so basically a werewolf… Anyways, would be crazy if I could manage to create such a morph, right? But heck, no, don’t expect that.
As for the selection of character, I definitely wanted to keep me out of the usual minotaur ish, werewolf ish creature ( that I already created long ago). Really looking forward to the weresquid and werefish on my end.
Yeah that would be a crazy morph, and a serious waste of development time for you.
All your concept decisions sound pretty original. Do you have concept sketches?
Maybe look into kua-toa concepts for reference on werefish, and bullywug for weretoad. Those are original D&D creatures, but have varying styles of concepts.
Might also consider calling it a were-piranha or something more specific - so to leave open options for different species of werefish creatures.
The morph would indeed take a serious and tedious time to create but would be a wonderful addition. It’s definitely a cool idea. I could absolutely think about some scenarios with that. Might be kind of too specific and niche though…
references you mentioned: might give it a look, always inspiring to see some other artist’s point of view and artistic decisions.
Don’t have any concept sketches done though. Usually do them in Zbrush in speed sculpt and see if they make sense to me. Once I find a shape to be the good direction, I just keep at it. For the werefish , I wasn’t thinking about the piranha but more about something abyssal with some glowing // flashing stuff. Some can be really creepy.
Yeah it would definitely be cool to see it happen on one complete clean mesh - but the best process to set this up in a game would be to have subtle morphs on the human character mesh and also some subtle morphs on the were creature then poof “Fiona/Shrek” shape shift with lots of covering fx that hides the ol’ model switch-a-roo.
That’s how Id do it anyway.
Indeed some intermediate morph targets would be needed to reach the first and last moment of the transformation. Would think about doing it the same way I think.
Anyways, little update for the week end. Low poly version is now done, 10.5 Ktris and uses 2048*2048 textures. Right now just the legacy version is ready. Will do the PBR version later on. Here is what it looks like at the moment.
Looks real good. Nice quality.
The cuts on the back might be slightly too dark but I really like the gradations in the base colors.
Do you mind sharing your texturing process? Are these textures generated in a sculpting program?
Quality stuff!
@theANMATOR2b : Glad you like it.
I might tweak a bit the texture and tone the cuts and sratches down a little. I think you’re right. Still a work in progress…
Nothing out of the ordinary for texturing, either go with photoshop or substance painter after baking all the necessary map in topogun or Xnormal. Usually do the base color texturing on the high rez model in zbrush.
This isn´t pleading for a freebie. Just a suggestion.
When you have the pack going, maybe after a few new creatures, you should consider adding your old ´were´ creatures to the pack. ´werewolf sold separately´ just sounds funny for a were-package.
How I handle were-morphs. Fade in - Fade out, lots of dust and debri particles and a push-back on the player character that knocks him into the air so he can´t get a good look at the whole transformation process close up. Smoke and Mirrors… smoke and mirrors.
Edit… seriously, leave the anglerfish ´bait´ as something we can change… can you imagine the hilarity of a were-angler with a donut?
The werewolf is an older creature that would either need to be updated or totally redone. It has a more cartoon ish feel than what is planned to do.
We were mostly talking about morphing I think, but of course the decision that makes most sense in development cost would be yours.
Regarding the were-angler, what’s wrong with the glowing / flashing appendix? Not that it’s hard to make it an optional part to hide or show; but it’s a pretty cool weapon. Didn’t get what you said about the donut…
Sorry if I came off too serious. It was a joke that the were-angler would have a donut as the lure… or maybe bacon strips. In the wild they use the lure to bring fish into their mouths… but if it were a were-angler, it would be trying to trick humans… hence the donut. I can already picture Homer Simpson dangling from its mouth.
Hey rosor - I got a chance to look at the image of the werecrab again, and I think you might consider lightening up the head area just a little bit. There seems to be some nice detail in that area, and looking at the overall composition of the texture shading, the face seems a little dark to me. I think if it was similar to the upper arms and claws it would look even better.
Nice progress. I’m guessing you are not married nor have any children.
@ theANMATOR2b : Mmm, just wait and see. Must be the lighting in the render. It was a quick render set up to tease potential customer, and the shadowed area are not bright enough. It looks really cool in real time though. I’ll try to get this done ASAP and embed a Sketchfab viewer so that you guys can see. Just need to finish up all the animations. Should be pretty quick, just a simple biped. Hopefully, there won’t be a big load of freelance gig before being done with it.
Edit: here is another quick render. Hope you see better.
What I would love to see is a smaller version of what this creature is based on. IE a werecrab also includes a small hermit crap that has a matching texture. So even if no morph was available I could scale over time via a animation curve and simply swap out creatures after it finishes. I guess its a poor mans morph but with some particle effects it could be very workable.
