THE RAKE

Remember when I said I liked creating terrifying monsters? Yeah, that hasn't gone away. That just lives in my brain now, just like the classic internet horrors that disrupted my sleep patterns back in the early 2010s.

Deviating from my usual workflow, I made the creature's skin texture before anything else, and I'm quite proud of how it turned out. Took a lot of fiddling to get the veins to be visible, but not TOO visible. I wanted to try and sort of recreate that creepy trail cam photo that I *think* was the original inspiration for the monster? I didn't want to just do it 1:1, though. Just recapture the effect. That being said, I think I did go a little overboard on the effects in Photoshop. I ended up making it look more like an old timey newspaper photo, which I still think looks great and very creepy in its own way, but it wasn't quite what I was going for.

Would you believe I've never bothered messing with Blender's compositor before? I think I just totally misunderstood what it was, and didn't realize it could be used to add post-processing effects to renders. Y'know, exactly like the ones I was doing in Photoshop. I could've saved several steps and gotten arguably better results. So I played around with it a bit and basically did a slightly dialed-back version of all the effects I'd done in Photoshop on the previous render.