The Monster of Shatter Keep
This horrifying creature is the primary antagonist of Shatter Keep. It hunts down the three human survivors, single-minded in it’s goal to kill them and trap their souls within the confines of the castle for all eternity.
Sculpted and Modelled in Blender.
Me and my team decided early on that we wanted the monster to be this scarred, gnarly looking figure. We wanted it to look like it was something horrific that had been experimented on and subjected to all kinds of cruelty, which is why when I was sculpting it, I covered it’s body in scars. The metal stitching and stapling on the animal skin shroud further pushes that unnatural look that we were going for. The reason the Monster has a goat skull for a head was that many European cultures from the time period we were loosely basing our game upon often associated goats with evil or the devil.
Textured in Substance Painter.
Rigged and Animated in Blender.
When animating the Monster, I deliberately wanted its movements to contrast with that of the Survivors. The Survivors all had very smooth, human motion in their animations. To juxtapose this, the Monster has jittery, stiff animation. I added noise and distortion to the motion curves in the graph editor to create the unnatural twitching and shaking of the creature. Many of the animations had to be exaggerated, especially the attack, so that the nuances of the animation would be noticeable from the in-game isometric camera perspective.