Blending Animalistic & Botanical Characteristics to Create a 3D Monster

Introduction

Hi everyone, I'm Baitong Li, a Term 1 student at Gnomon. I'm really honored to have the opportunity to be interviewed again by 80 Level. My story began when I played my first AAA game: The Witcher 3. Back in middle school, I was completely blown away by its immersive world and rich storytelling. That moment ignited a dream in me: to be part of making deeply story-driven games.

I've been working and studying in 3D art for about three years now, and my specialization is environment art. If you'd like to dive deeper into my journey, my studies, my projects, and how I developed my craft. You can check out my last interview about the Attic Studio project. I hope it's of value to you.

But now, let's move on to today's topic: the behind-the-scenes journey of my terrifying pumpkin monster project, Pumpkin Nightmare. I'm excited to share the creative process, the challenges I faced, and what I learned along the way.

Pumpkin Nightmare

Many people might wonder why an Environment Artist would spend time doing creature sculpting, but this was actually a real challenge I faced while working on my other projects. In practice, I've found that a significant portion of concept art relies heavily on sculpting skills, things like distinctive tree trunks, twisted vines, stylized organic forms, and more.

Take The Witcher 3, for example: the hanging corpses along the roads of Velen or the piles of human remains inside monster nests. They are technically part of the environment, yet building them is much closer to character or creature work. That made me realize that, as an Environment Artist, having a solid foundation in sculpting is extremely valuable.

So I decided to create a hybrid creature that would fit naturally into an environment, while strengthening my skills in this area. When I came across Taran Fiddler's Weretober 2020 entry, one sketch instantly caught my attention, a plant-themed creature combining pumpkin forms and vine-like limbs.

It perfectly blended animal and botanical characteristics, and I was completely drawn to it. That's when I knew I wanted to bring it into 3D and reinterpret it as a terrifying monster in the style of God of War or The Witcher.

I like to start every project by gathering a large amount of references, which makes the entire production process much smoother. For sketch-based concept art, references become even more crucial. George Zaky's approach to character sculpting gave me a useful direction: begin by breaking the creature down into its core components and collecting detailed references for each one.

So I divided the creature into several sections: vines, soil, stones, merged pumpkins, organic tissues, tree roots, and so on. After that, I wrote a background story for the creature, which is also something I often do for environment projects. A clear narrative gives me more purpose when searching for references, helps keep the material thematically connected, and strengthens the storytelling behind the entire project.

I imagined a grotesque, parasitic creature: a mass of flesh that hijacks and reshapes surrounding plant life to protect itself and hunt its prey. In this scenario, it sneaks into a small town's pumpkin field, merging with multiple pumpkins to grow claws and a barbed tail. The town's nightmare has arrived.

To support this concept, I drew inspiration from Venom and Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy, giving the creature a balance between animalistic and plant-like characteristics. As I explored the narrative, I realized the creature's center of gravity leaned too far forward and that it lacked an effective attack mechanism.

Looking at scorpion anatomy, I designed a spiked tail to give it a more functional offensive feature. Below is a simple flowchart of my references and design breakdown. The "color tone" section is mainly for later material exploration and wasn't the focus at this early stage.

Modeling & Sculpting Process

Anton Tenitsky's work gave me a strong direction for approaching the sculpt. I decided to break the creature down similarly to how one would separate the human body into anatomical sections, sculpting each part individually and then assembling everything.

One of the biggest challenges in this project was figuring out how to convey the creature's hybrid nature in a way that felt natural and believable, since it needed to blend both animal and plant characteristics.

Fortunately, Groot and the creature designs in God of War Ragnarök offered great inspiration. Even though their bodies are made of branches, bark, or stone, they still maintain the underlying structure of human anatomy. Following this principle, my sculpting process went through several stages:

1. Blockout with ZSpheres: I started by establishing the overall form using ZSpheres.
2. Building a human muscle structure: I shaped the body as if I were sculpting musculature, giving it a clear anatomical foundation.
3. "Plantifying" the forms: Based on those muscle flows, I layered plant shapes on top: carving vines, bark patterns details following the same directional rhythm as real muscles.
4. Final passes of additional surface detail: Once the structure felt cohesive, I added secondary and micro details.

Leaves & Other Details

As I continued refining the main body of the creature, I also started adding supporting details such as soil, extra vines, and rocks. These elements help the creature blend more naturally into its environment and strengthen the overall cohesion of the model.

You can see that I added dirt between the pumpkin seams and incorporated stone elements as well. For this stage, I highly recommend using Orb's brush set, which is excellent for carving out rock structures and edges.

One of the major components of this project was the creation of the leaves. I began by sculpting five different leaf variations, then baked them onto a plane in Substance 3D Painter. After that, I cut out the leaf shapes from the baked plane, and finally added variation to the leaves through some simple deformations.

For the leaf materials, I began with a base color and added edge gradients, broad color variation, insect-eaten areas, and other forms of breakup. I also incorporated vein details and additional elements to further enrich the surface.

Retopology, UVs & Texturing

I used Topogun to retopologize the model, aiming for a topology suitable for animation while keeping the polycount reasonable. I first exported a lighter high-poly version from ZBrush using Decimation Master, then brought it into Topogun to build the low-poly mesh. During the retopology process, I put extra effort into optimizing edge flow and preserving the silhouette as much as possible.

For the UVs, I didn't use RizomUV for this project. Instead, I relied on Maya's UV tools, focusing on efficient packing while also straightening certain UV shells to maximize texture usage. As for poly distribution, I kept a higher density in key areas such as the face, where detail matters most, and gradually reduced the density toward the outer parts of the body. This allowed me to maintain essential details while optimizing the overall polycount.

I created the creature's materials in Substance 3D Painter. Before diving into texturing, I usually begin with a color tone study and a rough plan for color distribution. This helps me stay focused on the overall harmony rather than getting lost in isolated details, especially important for a complex design like this pumpkin creature, where too much color noise can easily lead to visual clutter.

I then built the materials based on the different surface types. First, I added a basecolor layer, followed by broader value shifts, edge highlights, and multiple procedurally generated masks for additional detail. Unlike typical assets, however, this creature required a large number of hand-painted masks to maintain rhythm and ensure all the materials blended cohesively.

Whether I used procedural masks or hand-painted ones, I made sure the masks weren't too fragmented. One strong example is the creature's tail. Inspired by hand-painted concept art techniques, I used several light masks to adjust the tone of the vine forms as a whole, adding variations such as dryness, moss buildup, and subtle discoloration. As shown in the comparison below, this approach significantly elevated the material quality at an overall level.

Rendering & Lighting

I've always been a big fan of the creature renders from God of War, especially the clay-style renders by Andrew Ariza. This kind of block has an excellent sense of texture. So for this project, I decided to produce two sets of renders: one inspired by the God of War style block render, and another fully textured version.

I used Marmoset Toolbag for rendering, as it can quickly produce highly realistic results. I usually start with the same HDRI I use in Substance 3D Painter: Studio White Soft. So I can build my lighting on a foundation that already works well with the materials in Substance 3D Painter.

Since I wanted more control over the lighting, I slightly lowered the skylight intensity and relied more on the key light sources to define the overall look. My setup began with a classic three-point lighting system: a key light, fill light, and back light.

After that, I added several point lights to emphasize the areas I wanted to showcase and to bring out detail-rich regions. I also made sure to lift any areas that fell into overly deep shadows to avoid losing information.

For the textured renders, I introduced subtle color contrasts into the lighting setup, which enhanced the final look and added more visual richness to the presentation.

Conclusion

Thank you so much for reading this far! Learning is a never-ending journey, and even though this was my first character-focused piece and came with many challenges, from the extensive sculpting to the retopology, it taught me an incredible amount. Sometimes, setting personal challenges and pushing yourself to complete them is the best way to grow.

Seeking feedback, planning projects carefully, thinking from the big picture down to the smallest detail, and constantly staying curious these are principles I always carry with me. In the next few years of my studies, I'm committed to creating even better work and sharing more of my process with the community.

If you enjoy my work, feel free to follow me on ArtStation and The Rookies. I look forward to the next journey, see you there!

Baitong Li, Environment Artist