My inspiration behind Sircophagus was trying to make something that had an eerie appearance and make itself seem present, as well as use bits of existing culture to do so. The uncanny nature of the sarcophagus of ancient Egyptian culture was a perfect starting spot, as it had the unmoving characteristics of a human being as well as the connotations of death.
It is the undead and revitalized corpse of an ancient pharaoh trapped in his deathbed, lumbering around with this immense weight to him.
I built him by first drawing up a turn around for the sarcophagus and then moving to the turnarounds of arms and legs. Once the basic image was made I had brought it into Autodesk Maya and began to model the sarcophagus without holes, then adding holes later for the arms and legs. Then I hid the sarcophagus layer and made the limbs and attached them to the holes I had made in the body. Finally, I made a lower poly game ready version of the model and rigged him with bones and operated a skin weight to make sure that the hard shell sarcophagus body wouldn't have any elasticity to it.
The challenge of how to make the body move while the arms and legs stayed within their holes, and continue to have the sarcophagus body stay consistently solid was tough. However, after some long nights tweaking the bones and testing out where to parent the body, I figure out how to parent the body and arms to its own stand alone bone and parent that bone to the hips. This was by far the biggest accomplishment as it was unbelievably challenging to get the animations to work and look nice while the body wasn't moving the way it should, and being able to see it finally work after hours of tinkering felt amazing.
Making this character taught me that through persistence there is reward, even if the trouble of trying to make it work feels tedious and unneeded, and might be "good enough" you should still push yourself to the very end. Being able to see this character do his heavy footed walk for the first time made me feel such pride as a creator and knowing that I hadn't given up on it triples that proud feeling in me.
Next for Sircophagus, I am hoping to make my own texture for him, as the only other texture made for him was by a teammate on a separate project, but I would like to take it a step further and put my final touch on him.
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