The Golem was a monster we wanted to create as the main working horse of the Crimsons, who are the current lords of Hell. The idea was that it was constructed from flesh and magic around a steel-expanded skeleton and packed an immense punch, capable of stopping trains. It's power is put to use in a multitude of ways in Hell, but they're mostly used for heavy lifting.
After the initial concepts I moved the production to 3D-Coat and started sculpting. Lots of the creative work ended up being done in the sculpting phase and that took around a week. Next I got into retopology and dropped the vertex count of the model from around 16 million to 15 thousand. I started with using the automatic retopology tools in 3D-Coat and swapped over to the manual tools for a few days. I triangulated the model in Blender and made sure the silhouette was solid from all angles.
The texturing was mostly done in Substance Painter. This included a lot of creative work and evaluation about how we could make it read well in the environments we'd put it in. This stage took about a couple of days.
The last phase for me was rigging and skinning, and I used Blender's Rigify tools to give me a base skeleton, to which I added some extra bones, and let it generate a rig for me. I love how quick Rigify makes rigging, it really saves an immense amount of time and the rigs it generates are great for our purposes. Generating the rig took about an hour, and fixing the automatic vertex weights took the rest of the day.
Next we handed off the model to our animator and after he was finished, we set it up in Unity to replace our "Box Golem", which was literally made out of three boxes for prototyping purposes. It's great to see the team effort turn into a finished monster in the game! ːsteamhappyː
The picture was rendered in Blender using Cycles. Feel free to use it as a wallpaper and thanks for reading!
-Jaakko Jaakkola, 3D artist