Ritual Incarnation - Chupacabra Case Study

Description: I brought in Malachi Maloney to do some character concepts due to his ability to paint photorealistic human characters. One of the first concepts he did was the Chupacabra. The goal for the concept was to take information from actual eye witness accounts and get as close as possible while remaining unique. Malachi came up with some unique twists of his own, including the fly-like eyes and the inclusion of his genitalia or “junk”, and the first rendition of El Chupacabra was born.

Description: Massimo Righi is a rising CG Superstar and the first person I recruited to work on Ritual Incarnation. I was fortunate enough to catch Massimo on the way up and we have established an amazing rapport and close friendship over the last couple of years. Massimo nailed the concept and added in some more details of his own; needing to embellish areas where the concept was not clear or from angles it could not be seen. The three images in line here are the first sculpt before even more details were made to this remarkable model.

Description: These two images show typical hand painted textures without shaders and lighting in two test renders. These were done prior to our development of RPM and our current pipeline process. Looking at the results I knew right away we needed this creature to live and breathe and to appear right out of crypto zoology or nature. Massimo, always the perfectionist, felt we could punch up the details in the model with another pass as you will see in the images below.

Description: We were ready to move onto the next step and have the model rigged and animated when realizing having the model sculpted in this pose and not the traditional T-pose complicated the rigging process because we did not plan for this creature’s movement to be quadruped; at least not exclusively. The mistake was on me because I allowed the models to be sculpted posed knowing we were going to put together promotional renders. This gaffe caused me to reconsider certain aspects of the design including the ears and revisit the goals of realism for this creature. The following images show the reworked and properly posed model before the new textures.

Description: As you can see the ears and anatomical structure were altered. I felt bat ears gave a more horrifying look than the canine versions in the concept; something Malachi Maloney agreed with 100% after seeing the changes. This model was done over from scratch, leaving us with two versions of this model, and once again Massimo did a brilliant job—loaded with details. Although the sculpt looks fantastic these were not the last of the modifications.

Description: We really loved the skin tests results you see above—unfortunately Massimo had a hard drive crash and lost everything accept the model which was already uploaded on the FTP. The realism in the skin was amazing and we were forced to start over from scratch on the skin textures and shaders again.

Description: The three conceptual test renders above were done partially with Massimo Righi and Mario Taboada due to time constraints with Massimo’s schedule. Mario’s PC doesn’t have the horsepower of the beast machine Massimo works with and he was unable to pose and render out a test on the highres model and created a Med-Res model to work with. As you can see the skin is a bit different and we have removed the fly eye and replaced it with a reptilian version. There is texture stretching in the shoulder that needs correction but the images were only created to show publishers what the assets looked like and the basic art direction for the characters. During our meetings with publishers we let them know we planned to write custom shaders and tech to replicate the settings of Mental Ray in engine. Of course no one said it aloud but the response was clear: they thought we were completely full of shit. As you see on other areas of the site we have since created RPM to bridge this gap. Although we are not showing the results of RPM yet here as we prepare them for the press I can tell you we have been able to replicate the skin settings you see here almost 100% just as we pitched it. The last image below shows one of the last current tweaks to the model made in the eye area; although once again it will not be the last alteration made. We have only shown this model because there is a lot to this creature we are not revealing.

Description: As you can see creating a lifelike and believable creature is a long process that involves multiple changes and pitfalls along the way. Keep an eye peeled for RPM results with this creature and other elements on the website and in the media. We are the mostly visually advanced with Real Time assets in the world; expect cinematic results like these in game.