From the start, I knew that I didn't want the Necrotrophs to be hostile looking at first glance. When the player spotts a Necro, there should be a moment of hesitation as they try to discern if what they are looking at is of any threat. So for the first round of sketches, we played around with different ways the Necro could "transform" from appearing human to looking hostile.
Once we found the face we liked, figuring out the rest of the body was fairly easy. We instantly knew a character like this needed to have ripped clothing, lots of dirt, and overall just raggedy looking. While the rest of the body was being fleshed out, Jonny had simultaneously began choosing colors. Being a parasite-controlled human and NOT a Zombie, more pink, yellow, and purple-ish colors were chosen to show the Necro was more diseased and "possessed" looking rather than corpse like.
While we felt overall the character was moving in the right direction, we still needed to make some changes to the mouth and face. At this stage, the tentacles resembled more of a plant than a realistic parasitic organism. Also, we wanted to show that the host's body was trying to reject the organism so Jonny added more rashes to the Necro's mouth and chest (as the tentacles most frequently touch this area of the body). We ended up going for more of an octopus/sea creature look for a couple reasons: 1. The parasite needed to look like it belonged to a water-based environment (since it primarily lives most of it's life within a host) and 2. Adding suction cups hinted that in addition to strangulation, the parasite also uses suction to hold it's prey in place (so that it can fully emerge from it's current host and transfer itself to another or just feed).
The first stages of the sculpture were looking great, however, he was a bit too muscular for essentially a nomad that roams the street stalking prey. The Necrotroph needed to look more like an agile hunter/predator as opposed to a burly man. The reference I turned to for his appearance and behavior was a Hyena.
Fun Fact:
"Hyenas make a variety of vocalizations including wailing calls, howling screams and the well-known "laughter" used to alert other clan members up to three miles away of a food source."
The next big change came from Jonny reworking the Necro's back. We felt that showing a deeper level of integration with the parasite would make the character more believable. Now by showing that the parasite had weaved itself within the host's rib cage and spine/neck, we felt it grounded the character more in reality and allowed us to hint at how the parasite was controlling it's host (via nerve connections between the tentacles and spinal chord/brain stem).
Previous News Posts Matthew DiPrinzio
(Low-Poly with Phong in Half-Life Model Viewer)
Model and Texture by Jonny Ree
Animations by Sick420
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(buried)
Nice! Let me know if I can use it in my mod Armed Warfare in the future! I intend to make the biggest mod in mod history for HL2 :) many types of npc's etc...
I suggest you make this NPC special that you can only kill it when its mouth is opened :) or something like that :) I suggest the stomach if it has a parasite in it ;)
(buried)
Maybe make the mouth a little go opened faster ;) nice animations!
Awesome work, you should have npcs that look similar to this but that isent infected. Wich will lead to player sometimes hesitate.
That's a good idea!
EPIC article!
wow very nice model
Ouch! Looks brutal :o
I want that mod for the first place!!
not mortewood plaza that have nothing promising...only skins and weapons... =(
I believe in YOU!!! But I think its unreal to do all work to 30 january...
You better do if a mouth of man will bleed when this tentacles comes, or something like that o.O
Reminds me of the creatures of blade 1
lol that's crazy animations,
Nasty animation there! Good job guys! :D
Animations are pretty cool, but on the concept art Necrotroph's face distorts in a much more extreme way. It looked twice as creepy. Did something make you decide to make it less extreme, or is it still WIP?
It just came down to the difficulty of pulling it off. Having his skin peel so far back to reveal a bone-jaw was a much more difficult than we had originally thought. So it just came down to time and technical difficulty.
It kinda remind me of the vampires in John Legend.Did you get inspiration for the necro's look.
It's been quite a busy week ... good job guys!
Oh my god... i will totally follow this.. it looks so damn promissing!
Don't forget about a few female models ... Sharizadel.deviantart.com
This mod looks VERY promising i just the development focuses on game play rather then just glitz and glamour and gore, and so far it seems to focus just on that and that makes it much more promising then a lot of professional games i have seen.
Is your mod inspired by Dead Space?
No not really. Never played Dead Space.
Hum ok i tought it because in DS, the badass are also called necromorph and get crapy tentacules around their mouth and ... other locations. :P
Anyway their design looks pretty fine in your mod.
Very Dead Space/Aliens-ish. Extremely well-done renders and animations, too! Keep it up! :D
Pretty nice
I just think that the tentacles should look less "octopus" like