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• Initial ideas
• Overview
When I started coming up with an idea for my creature/monster I already had a good idea what I wanted, I wanted a monster with no real physical form. It would be primarily made of a smoke like gas form that had eyes throughout its gas, it would antagonise the player by taking various forms and "possessing" other items in order to cause a challenge to the player. The main reason for this is to keep the player guessing what is dangerous and what isn't.
• Smoke Monster idea
• Lost smoke monster
There are several well known smoke enemies in media, most notably would be the smoke creature from lost. It shows up several times as a non descript black cloud of smoke, it also has the ability to take the form of other people and inhabit the dead. I would probably use some of these idea in my creatures abilities, because I'm going for a PEGI 7 rating though I would have it possess household objects instead of dead body's as it would be less grotesque or scary.
• Loki's Alioth
Another well known smoke monster would be from Loki, this being the Alioth, this shows a smoke creature that can take on multiple forms in the smoke. The reason I choose this is because I would want my creature to be able to taker on multiple forms.
• Design ideas
• Overview
As stated above the creature idea I have is based on a smoke entity that can possess many any inanimate objects, it also shows up as a formless smoke entity that follows the player. So I thought that showing the entity as various items would be interesting, but only one had to be properly developed into a final sketch, so i decided to go with its "main form.
• Initial sketches
For the initial sketch's I I gave the rough "silhouette" of several key items in the game including keys, books, picture frames and food/miscellaneous small objects. The idea for this was as stated earlier that the entity could possess other items so creating version of it possessing items oul be a good idea.
• Improved sketch idea
the following image was taken from the idea on the top image (bottom left) of a smoke filled with eyes. I tried improving in the idea by having it creating a "more scary form" for itself, the sketch is supposed to be it crawling out from the floor through a "hole" made of the dark "eye filled smoke". I intended for this to be the way the monster would spawn upon finding the player character and before giving chase.
Following is an image created using a combination of hand drawn sketch and Photoshop, I to hand draw a skeleton but wasn't having much luck. So I took the result onto photoshop and used the paint tool to try and make it look more like what I wanted, in he end I highlighted what I did and asked the built in AI to make it look more like a skeleton. I then proceeded to try and make a smoke effect by smudging some semi transparent "black/grey" over the image. I then added some "eyes" to the image to give it a more
This was quickly revised to being a smoke generated bay a mesh resembling the basic shape of a humanoid, as such the smoke would always have a somewhat humanoid shape somewhere in it.
• Final sketch
The below image was a final image I created for the creature, it was designed as a typical " character sheet so that it could be used on blender to aid in the creation of the actual model. The image itself was created using the above image taken into photoshop and altered to have a "full body" as well as a side and back image. As stated on the image the in built AI was used with permission from the lecturer to attempt to see if it could make it look more skeletal in nature.
• Creating the a smoke
Because my monster primarily needed smoke as a key part of its "character" I had to figure out what was the most ideal way to add the effect, after looking online for the best ways to accomplish this I found out that it was in blender or unreal. (there where other options but I didn't have any prior knowledge with those programs)
Some of the key videos that helped with my research was as follows:
I then proceeded to go and use the two programs in an attempt to create my own "smoke" one thing I quickly realised was that I had no real understanding of the particle/physics engine of unreal that and my computer would have issues attempting to run it, so this made it that I had to do all my tests in blender. In my research I found the blender had the most simple and quick way to make smoke.
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