New Thing: Gloomhaven Night Demon

I really enjoyed the sculpting work that I did on the Flame Demon, so I decided to dive in even deeper with some more of Zacharias Reinhardt's techniques and try my hand at the Night Demon.  In this case, I specifically wanted to use his Improved Asymmetrical Sculpting technique.  As I watched that video, I was immediately reminded of the process that I used to make the Living Bones model, where each part of the model was its own object and so could be individually posed.  I found that model of posing very intuitive (and forgiving of mistakes or late-game idea changes!), so was eager to try it out!

Just as he does in his videos, I started with a cube that has a Subdivision Surface modifier on it to make it roundish.  I then extruded faces to make the very general shape, doing a very rough version of the extrusion-shaping that Miguel Zavala has perfected.  Since I knew that I would be doing sculpting work, I didn't worry about adding in details the way Miguel does.  Because I'd be making left-right copies of the individual body parts, I only bothered making one arm, one leg, and one crazy back arm thing (the Night Demon Artwork is particularly cool looking).

With my roughed out body shape completed, I realized that I needed to do some work on the proportions.  Specifically, the body was way too long for the limbs that I'd made and just didn't look right.  I'm a big fan of using the tools that are available to make things easy on myself, so I added a basic human meta-rig (like I did when customizing the Gloomhaven Guards) and scaled it up until its shoulders matched the shoulders that I had designed.  As I had expected, the body was all kinds of weird; the bottom of the pelvis went almost all the way down to where the knees should be!

Fortunately, at this point, I only needed to adjust a grand total of 8 vertices to fix that issue.  So, I selected them and then moved them upwards until my torso conformed a bit more closely to human standards.  I adjusted my leg to match the new hip location, and ended up with a rough form that I was much happier with.

With the rough shape in place, it was time to sculpt!  I decided to work on the torso first, using the same Clay Strips, Smooth, and Crease techniques that I wrote about on the Flame Demon.  I turned on X-Axis symmetry and started making my rough spheroid into a torso.  The original artwork has interesting ridges instead of normal ribs/pecs, so I did some aggressive work with the Clap Strips to make them.  I then added on the abs and other musculature details.  That put me at my first decision point: how do I want to deal with all of those spikes.

I had to decide between sculpting the spikes directly onto the body or making them as separate meshes and placing them onto the body (like I did for the Living Bones model's pauldrons).  Since I had decided that this was going to be a sculpting exercise, I decided to go with the former and sculpt them in.  To do that, I used the Snake Hook tool, which is really impressive with Dyntopo turned on.

Snake Hook grabs some geometry and stretches it out, making new geometry as needed to create a drawn out spike.  As you'd expect, this worked perfectly for making all of the crazy chitin spikes on the Night Demon.  I made some of my spikes too small, so I just used the Inflate tool to embiggen them a bit, which I figured would help when it came time for printing.  When I invariably made them too round via my inflation, I just used Crease to sharpen it back up.

After I sculpted detail onto all of the body parts, all I had to do was copy them.  So, I used alt-d to make linked duplicates of the arms/leg and then positioned the clones where they needed to be.  I did a lot of playing around with different orientations, trying to balance looking cool with the need to physically print the things.  Because each "bone" in each limb was a different mesh, it was really easy to move them around as I tried different orientations.  My initial plan had been to use Boolean Union to join everything together after I had a pose that I liked, but the joints between sections weren't so apparent after printing, so I largely kept them separate.

As you can see on the Thingiverse thing, I ended up separating the head for printing purposes.  The body can be printed upright (with supports), but I think that those tendrils on the back of the head need to be printed pointing upwards.  Since the head was a separate mesh already, this was really easy to accomplish; I just made a quick copy of the head (and moved it to the side), then put a Boolean Difference on the body to cut the original head mesh out of the neck.  To make it easier to glue back in place, I scaled up the head to 1.04, then hid it (by pressing H), leaving me with a headless torso.