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A short text from Marian Arnold (Lead Artist) about the development of Sanddemons in Divine Divinity:
Each monster and each character is a new challenge in the creation process and the bigger it is, the more details will be necessary. That means of course that the effort increases proportionally. The last days I was intensively busy with sanddemons. First I was looking in my papers for the scribble I once made and I used it as a template.
This demon is obviously one of the larger monsters. Approximately double human size. 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 really good, rather really evil. But good modeled.
Okay, lets just say “well done” instead of good, like a steak Actually that doesn´t mean the demon should get the same color like a steak, even if he wanders through similar hot regions. Well, so let’s just say "modeled with a lot of detail, well-textured and very organically and naturally animated", okay?
If you look at the drawing closely you can see on the body a lot of clearly shaped out muscles. If you work with 3D Studio MAX, you have now several possibilities, how to achieve such amount of detail. Who knows the program good enough can select between NURBS modeling, form out muscles with the soft selection tools, surface tools or " Clay" modeling. There are other ways, but those are the most important ones, if you don’t want to use 3D-Scanning technologies. The first three methods you have to imagine simply as if you carves the outside shape of the model by imprinting small areas of a thick aluminum foil with using different degrees of difficulty. The last procedure produces the desired model by putting together a series of balloons, one for each muscle.
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 almost two days long.
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.
After the raw model was finished now, I called our other Larian Studios’ graphic artists (André, Ingmar and Kurt) together and asked for their opinions. The result was some smaller modifications and improvement suggestions, which were fast implemented. All in all that took me approximately one day.
After a short final check I began to build the skeleton for the body. That means a colored, rudimentary skeleton model is created which executes the necessary movements and transfers them over the original body. An important point when animating is to express the character of the creature with the help of its movement. In this case the Demon moves slowly and powerfully according to his role as "Hero of Might&Magic". ;-)
For a monster in the game several animations are necessary. Walk, hit, die, attack, casting a spell and more...
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