I’ve been working on a new enemy which Nixi has drawn, I want it to be called a Velocirator, mainly because it’s a rat with a Velociraptor’s body, but also because it rolls nicely off of one’s tongue.

Now for the real reason of this rant, this is the second in the four part series about the enemy, which started out as nothing more than the “tiny foe”, the less than dreadful, Velocirator!

Using Håkan, I’ve compiled this video where I model the Velocirator from start to finish.

Enjoy it!

Nixi and me work quite closely, once Nixi has finished a concept he hands it to me so that I will be able to start modeling it, during the time I work on the model I often take Nixi away from new concepts and make him give me some critique on my model.

Then when Nixi and I agree upon the model being finished I UVW map, rig and skin the model after that I usually put a really basic texture onto the
model and start to animate.

Being more of a technical artist I do find general anatomy to be my main issue while modeling things, especially human anatomy, which luckily is something that Nixi is quite good at.

This week, stating today, we’ll publish a little series of connection posts that will show you how we make a character/enemy from start to finish.

Finally, I’m back at the island after a couple of smooth days back home. It was nice to eat three meals a day and do nothing at all, just dragging the feet behind me and enjoying friends, family and the wonderful weather. Thank you easter bunny and Jesus Christ.

The video below shows how I work when making a concept: in this case an enemy rat mixed with a kangaroo and a velociraptor. I knew that it had to be small sized, come in hordes and perform some sort of jumping attack, making it more vulnerable and easier to hit if you get the timing right.

I started off making a couple of quick sketches to find something that could work. As reference I found some hideous pictures of the African nude mole rat. It’s probably the ugliest animal on the planet and when you see it, you instantly want to kill it. This creature looks like as if someone copy pasted a human penis, gave it eyes, legs and a nose. It didn’t quite feel right to keep that body type so instead I decided to move towards, as mentioned, the kangaroo/raptor direction.

It took about 2-3 hours to complete but luckily the video is like 8x speed. I hope you enjoy watching it.