The Grotesque from Diablo III

The Grotesque from Diablo III, a photo by anthonysrivero on Flickr.

Diablo 3 is in open beta this weekend, so I figured I'd throw up a monster from the game that tens of thousands of people around the world will be killing repeatedly over the next few days.

This was one of my favorite monsters to work on in Diablo 3. I love creating fleshy, bloody, mutated monsters, and this guy definitely fits the script. He was originally concepted by my friend and former colleague, Cheeming Boey aka Boy Obsolete. Before he scrawled intricate designs on styrofoam cups, he designed and animated many a monster.

This version is slightly updated from the version currently in the game. I wanted to test out some new tools and there were some things about him that bugged me. I brought the model into 3dCoat to retopologize him and touch up his texture in order for him to look a little sharper up close. Since Diablo is a game played from a top down isometric point of view, the in-game assets don't always hold up that well in close ups, since they're optimized for a camera that's pretty far away from the action.

This is not a normal mapped model. The techniques used are pretty "old school" combined with more current production processes. Essentially, what you're looking at is just a basic diffuse texture map applied to a low poly model with all the lighting information painted in.