Lumbering around would inaccurately describe the movement of a Sleer.
Lumbering is aggressive and rushed. The sleer was timeless, it didn’t have anywhere to be.
It lumbered not. Life beneath the Earth was solitary and uninteresting.
It more accurately persisted.
It continued to move its rice paper limbs because if it stopped moving the chill of the cave would mean death.
In the midst of dragging its horrible skeletal burden across this horrible place to avoid a horrible death, the Sleer was rewarded.
It was the echo of rocks shifting in such an intentional way that the Sleer knew it was not alone in the cave anymore.
A flashlight beam grazes the Sleer’s armature, but the climbers are hysterical with excitement at their discovery and they don’t notice anything.
The Sleer stares, hypnotized by the prey clambering into her den.
Pains of hunger flood her empty stomach, coaxed out of their futility by the sight of a genuine meal.
Designing a subterranean cave hag gave me a glimpse into what it takes to design a creature.
Starting out I was cherry-picking anatomy from creatures that are already working prototypes without trying to completely botch real world physics. I mainly looking at creatures that were subterranean.
I learned an important way to evaluate how well your character’s design reads is to look at it in silhouette. Colors, textures and other details that compete for your attention disappear so you can judge the success of the shapes.
Then, there’s taking your rough ideas and sculpting a convincing model in ZBrush, which is very much a part of the design process. Getting a feel for how things look in three dimensions helps you give your creature a grounded quality.
After the shape was in a good place, I UV Unwrapped the mesh in Zbrush and brought the textures into Substance Painter so I could tattoo some Smart Materials over our girl here. Substance was especially helpful in building convincing bone textures thanks to all the grunge masks you can create.
Once I’ve brought my textured model into an Octane scene, I converted the image textures from Substance to the Octane shader network and hunted for interesting lighting possibilities on the form. Once I had that, I found flattering camera angles and did multi-pass renders to composite everything in After Effects with various cave photos I had purchased.