These are some
of the words of the almighty creator of the Sanddemon, not fearing this person
could prove a mortal mistake ...
Only dark and
evil Mages dare to summon demons however, this process is never without danger.
Summoned creatures always have a chance to lose control and turn against the
Conjurer, especially powerful specimens such as Sand Demons. In order to succeed,
rituals like human/animal sacrifices or rare minerals have to be offered as
gifts and the summoned Demon has to be satisfied with these offerings. If this
venture succeeds the reward is a fearsome ally. In the Desert of the Divinity
some demons still live as remnants of long forgotten demonic armies...
Now read what
the creator has to say about his creation
Each monster and
each character is a new challenge in the creation process. The bigger the
creature, the more detailed they need to be, let’s just say, "modeled
with a lot of detail, well textured and very organically and naturally animated".
That means of course that the effort increases proportionally. The last few days
I was intensively busy with s Sand Demons. First I looked at my scribbles I made
and used it as a template.
www.cdv-presse.de/demon_scribble.tif
This demon is obviously one of the larger monsters. Approximately double that of
your average human. You can imagine that such a creature with this size will get
a lot of attention and has to look especially good. In fact not only does it
have to look good, but also very evil.
If you look at the drawing closely you can see clearly shaped out muscles on the
body. We achieved this amount of detail working with 3D Studio MAX; we had
several possibilities on how to achieve this amount of detail. Anyone who knows
the program well enough has 4 options...
1) NURBS modeling
2) Form out muscles with the soft selection tools
3) Surface tools
4) Clay" modeling
The first three ways were either too complicated for what I wanted to do or too
time consuming to get all the necessary details. So I used a Clay plug in to
form the body slowly by adding spheres and elliptical forms. As you can imagine
it took me a while. After this long process I let the program generate a surface
from it. Afterwards I replaced or moved the spheres and calculated the surface
again and again, until I was satisfied with the general appearance. The whole
procedure kept me busy for about two days just on this one character.
www.cdv-presse.de/Demon_makingof.jpg
Now I searched through our texture library and began to create a number of
unique textures with Photoshop. These I fitted to the body, corrected them
exactly, and rendered the model again and again.
For a monster in the game several animations are necessary. Walk, hit, die,
attack, casting a spell and more...
www.cdv-presse.de/demonwalk.gif
www.cdv-presse.de/monspecial.gif
www.cdv-presse.de/demonmagic.gif
Naturally looking movement is extremely important and therefore I spend a lot of
time on the improvement and the exaggeration of the animations.
Finally, after adding cameras and light sources with other designers, the
monster can be finished for the rendering. We then check the monster still in
the game and only if everything is correct then the creature is considered
really finished.
Well, that’s it... check the finished Demon, it looks still almost the same as
the drawing, only slightly different and better. Be warned and be careful, if
you meet one of these Sand Demons in Divinity somewhere, you will have no time
to check out the details... just try to stay alive.
