Three dimensions of pure terror (Patreon)

So this is kind of what I meant when I said I was doing prep for the upcoming scene. I would normally save it for after the scene's been complete, but I feel bad I haven't been providing early updates so here's a SNEAK PEAK at least.  
Io went through multiple ideas of how to visualise MHF's remote appearance which I'll let him talk about in his commentary, but the last thing he sent me was a video of System Shock 2. And that's when I Knew.
In addition to that I decided to get that super early 90's 3D look on for extra creepiness. Sudden change of media is great for spooking people (as seen in Courage The Cowardly Dog)

It was time to dust off 3D software i haven't touched since quitting my games job, though it wasn't easy since my version of Zbrush was much older and I lost all my scripts and shortcuts and in-house tools I was so used to in Max. 

I didn't feel like modelling a face from scratch so I attempted a Zbrush sculpt first. I actually got it quite polished, but that version ended up crashing without backups! No, I did not miss 3D. 

Anyway, I didn't need anything super detailed for retopo, so I just went ahead and made a lowpoly from it in 3DsMax

I deliberately didn't use any smoothing to keep that vintagey CGI look. (it also looks hilarious when smoothed out and I'd definitely need more and better geometry to make smoothing look right....and at that point one might as well bake a normal map)

Because I still hold a grudge against my 3D job, I tried to be as minimal with the workflow as I could get away with, but I still had to texture the damn thing. It took me about 5 minutes though, so, no big loss.

SUCH EFFORT

I then played with some expressions I can actually use in the panels. I guess someone more technically-minded could've rigged it, but I didn't feel like it'd save me much time with this project:

And now for the fun part - rendering! I made a texture in PS and a couple of backing planes and finally stuck it all into Marmoset 2:

...i might genuinely make it into a wallpaper later. 

I'll probably do more adjustments on the whole thing later, but for now it's good enough that I can start working it into layouts.

Here's another creepy render: