For Killing Floor we wanted to redesign all the creatures from the original mod. We used the original character background and model as our start-point and wanted to give some of them a little “extra”. For the crawler we felt it would be interesting to make him more spider-like and play off of people’s fear of arachnids, making him more the sort of thing that makes everyone shudder when it drops down your neck!
The initial concept for the crawler was done in Photoshop manipulating different photos of people and spiders together. We were able to quickly find a new direction for the character that was creepy and gave us a jump off point for the sculpting process.
The final concept was completed in a 3d sculpting software called Zbrush. This tool was used to sculpt the creature using “digital clay”. The crawler was given a unique silhouette by adding spidery legs, spikes and claws to help identify him amongst the specimens easily and to really drive home the whole spider image.
Zbrush allowed us to model the high polygon model and concept the final character at the same time. After several revisions the final Zbrush sculpt was complete and served as a high polygon model that we could use to bake information to the low polygon model and use in game materials.
After creating the low-polygon model and baking the information from the high polygon model using the 3d modeling and rendering software Modo, final color and texture was added. Different pattern designs and colors from spiders were used to help his menacing appearance and make him feel “poisonous”. Here is a shot of the final crawler in-game .