Here we go again! I wanted to keep working on humanoid figures, but needed something a little more challenging and unconventional that crossed over into creature territory. Zombies (unconventional?), mutated fellows and the like.
This is a Styx. Bonus points if you can name which game it's from!
Submitted your answers? It's from the PC game Sacrifice released in 2000, one of my all time favourite games and my favourite unit. It's also in the title of the post! Here's a link to the Styx's wiki page, there's a couple of images at the bottom of the page. I would have linked a video too, but there wasn't anything suitable on YouTube. Here's a quick run down - the Styx is an undead ranged unit. In-game, it brings its skull torch to the barrel (the shoulder gun), aims and fires the cannon.
Like the previous project, everything was done in ZBrush and post in PS.
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Here are some screen shots from other angles.
It looks sorta okay - from the front. I made some silly design decisions and executed others poorly. The spine and the surrounding flesh at the back doesn't look very good at all. I should have spent more time detailing it. The black talons of the cannon look kind of plastic-y. The red shoulder blob thing is weird - it was supposed to resemble the Zerg Overlord's floaty balloon. Until I get better at digital painting, I'll need to find images to create textures from, instead of merely poly painting on the model. I had a cursory look online for membrane-like sacs for this project, but quit way too early into the process.
The cuts and gashes were intentionally clean; there's no bruising and bleeding when there's no blood circulating, right? I completely forgot to consider that if you smack a zombie, zombie juice is gonna leak out. Take it to heart, friends: there's always gunk.
Speaking of which, I've noticed a trend in my texturing. It's boring as heck. The details I've thought to put in are coming out muted. For example, I added scorch marks to the cannon barrel. Heavy burn marks on the interior, slightly less on the outside, with the front being the most charred. None of which can be seen. It seems that I'm very timid when it comes to texturing - even when I add grunge, I do it so uniformly that it's barely perceptible. Look at the pants. And the skin. I need to be more heavy handed, and less of a texture-wuss.
Moving on. I intended to render out some black fire in Maya that I could add to the composition (in-game, the skull stick emits a black flame particle effect), but was unable to achieve the effect that I wanted, even after directly following various tutorials. SO MANY SETTINGS, it's nuts in there! So I grabbed some fire images off Google and colour corrected them. It looks like smoke. In retrospect, it needs more colour variance in there - perhaps a dark bluish purple at the core? It also obscures the details in the skull's interior; I should probably stop doing that.
I really wanted to indicate the size of the creature. I think it would have added substantial visual impact. It's supposed to be pretty tall; in-game it's roughly two times taller than a human. I decided that the creature's head and skull-on-a-stick should be human-sized. I had a fiddle in PS midway through the project:
Something like that. Anyway, I failed to come up with the means to satisfactorily highlight the scale. I couldn't have just built a tree and plonked it down, you need to construct the whole set for it to work. Which would go far beyond the scope of the project. Adding another creature or character from the game would have possibly been too much, too. More importantly, that creature would have needed its own scale reference; normal isn't really a thing in Sacrifice. If you have any ideas, please let me know!
Wow, am I long-winded. One last picture:
I originally intended to have this as my final render angle. It's supposed to resemble the game icon of the unit, and I specifically wanted half the face in shadow. More menacing, red eyes in the dark, weapon pointed directly at the camera, that sort of thing. However, I was told that it obscured a lot of details. I didn't notice this at all. The torso is more or less hidden (possibly solved with better lighting), and the straight-on angle of the shoulder cannon makes it look like a hand, almost. Should one sacrifice a model's readability for a cooler shot? I'm going to have to revisit this in the future.
Finally, about the 2d art: there's no presentable concept art unfortunately. I spent an immense amount of time trying to draw the guy and failed miserably. In particular, I just couldn't figure out the cannon. I had tons of reference (Zerg cuddlies and Tyranids, mainly), and was still unable to pull it off. I was eventually forced to move on, and had to do it on the fly in ZBrush. I did have a couple of vague ideas - that the barrel should be bone and encased in flesh, had a red glowy thingy (like from the game), and had those side vent things. The rest I improvised. Which makes me feel dirty. Doing mock-ups in 3d is actually very handy, but my intention was to draw it first. Because of this, I decided I needed to do a much more intensive drawing programme. Wish me luck.
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Caution: Over-enthusiasm.
Sacrifice is a game with superb graphics, exceptional gameplay and stellar voice casting/acting. Tim Curry! Tara Strong! Cam Clark! Grey DeLisle! Holy crap! Buy this game! From GOG: here! Or from Steam: here! I'd like to babble on about spells and creatures and gods, but you don't have all day.
OR DO YOU? If you love this game, please geek out with me in the comments!
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