Hi!
In this blogpost I would like to talk about the reiteration of the troll mesh for our game.
The troll of our game is a bigger enemy type, both in its appearence and as a threat. It’s inspiration and lore is that this old troll who resides in the bunker is an old John Bauer troll who, ever since he was insprisoned in the bunker some odd millenia ago, lives in the dark comfort of the bunker.
The idea we drew on paper ended up looking like this:
The turnaround for the troll
Which when turned into a 3D modell looked like this:
The first 3D modell for the troll
As you can see some minor changes to it’s proportions were made but it still encompasses the main idea.
But even though the main idea is there it did not translate well into 3D, it does not look as big and threatening as imagined. The problem with it is that it’s silhouette does not say anything, it is just straight. For it to speak to us and carry the message of dangerous we needed that to be changed. So what we did was to take the uper part of the trolls body and made it two times bigger.
The second iteration of the troll (we later enlarged the head as well)
This may look somewhat ridiculous but it works much better. It carries the message of dangerous very well.
So even though the first iteration of the troll is closer to th original concept, the second one is much more readable. In the future it is wise to think much more of its silhoutte in the concept stage than in the beginning. It is also important to note that you should not be afraid to exaggerate its proportions. Even though the games artstyle aims for a styilized realism, this huge and somewhat comical upper body acctually fits into the game and reads better than what it would have with normal proportions.
