From our 3D Artist devblog:"
When our coder told me that we needed a monster that is easy to kill, I immediately thought of the Wrench from Gears of War. A tiny, yet bastard monster, not so dangerous alone, but quite troublesome when in large groups. These were the guidelines that we gave to our concept artist Denis Gualtieri.
Every monster inside the temple has something that reminds of a human being. The Savage has a quite anthropomorphic body, but his most creepy part is hidden inside his huge mouth. When he runs at you and hugs you with his cute (!) arms, suddenly his mouth opens and reveals a suffering human head inside. I just love this.
I loved it a little less when I found myself struggling to attach its low-poly mesh to the body. It was quite a pain to find the proper workflow, and in the end I had to ask the help of the animator too..
What I actually enjoyed it the most was the sculpting part. I guess I give my best at organic modeling.
And when the model is so creepy I like sculpting even more :P
After the sculpting is done, I switch back to Blender for the retopology. I found myself preferring Blender for retopology rather than the more famous TopoGun (or even zBrush lately). It gives me much more freedom than other tools. Seriously, Blender is getting better and better every release.
xNormal is still the best option for textures baking. So I split the model in two (actually, I divided it into more than 20 different meshes to get a clean bake), to have a good-res texture and for shader purposes.
I needed two materials mostly to be able to set a Subsurface Scattering shader for its skin, and still get a metal look to the mechanical parts.
And that’s all, more or less :P
In the game each and every spell you get will affect this monster. The light will blind him, telekinesis will let you grab him and throw him against everything, and so on.
About his story… you’ll have to wait and play the game :P"Here more screens!
Impressive work! This thing sure looks organic.