Monster design: Creating a family.

Some new monster designs today, I'm really happy with the texture painting workflow I've ended up with. I'd really like to be able to make more high poly creatures, but the more detail in an animated character in game, the more processing power it requires. Static objects run OK even when quite high poly, but for creatures and other animated objects, they present a bit of a bottleneck.

I've already got a whole bunch of monsters, and I've tried to reuse armatures as much as possible, because not only does it reduce time spent on re-rigging the meshes, but also requires less time to animate.

However, the monsters that I do have are quite diverse, maybe a bit too much so. The different levels of the dungeon are going to look like a zoo at this rate. So I've been thinking about how to create themes for different levels of the dungeon. In effect, take one monster and build a family of monsters around it.

I already have two kinds of plant men, diseased and healthy, I wondered how plant men procreate, and decided that the female plant man has a toxin which can transform humans and other creatures in to plant men.

So here is the female plant creature, part human, part plant, all monster.

In the same way I want to diversify the fish men I already have, so I decided on having an adult fish man, and a larval form.

These guys are pretty slow, but quite strong. They are the juvenile version of the adult fish man:

Or maybe a different species, I haven't decided yet. Once they are in game I'll decide what to do with them. I may just leave it up to the player's imagination to decide what they are.

Now that I've got a half fish half human monster armature, I'll probably make a mermaid as an NPC. :) There are going to be some NPCs in the game who can trade you stuff or give you a special quest or even join your team. The mermaid would probably ask you to find her lost shell or something like that. Though perhaps a swearing, foul mouthed mermaid who sends you after a barrel of extra strength booze might be more fun.

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