Gyra Game update: the Lactant

I apologize for the silence, I've been working almost non-stop on some game stuff...

Awhile ago I drew this concept of a honey pot inspired ant monster. First here's some of the old sketches I did trying to find a good look/shape for them but nothing really clicked:

I was trying to stick to the colors honey pot ants pretty closely but eh... these designs just kinda sucked. The nectar filled butt is a cool idea but I couldn't think of a good way to incorporate them into the game as an enemy. (this was also before the design aesthetic of the Insectrix monsters was more clear to me! So they were more bug-like and less cute)

But a few days ago I tried sketching a honey pot ant again, applying the knowledge I have now of what the bug monsters should look like and came up with this: the Lactant

I felt so strongly about this that I immediately started modeling the field version of them!

They're working in game, wandering around a little flowery field... The Lactant is can be hit but they're invulnerable to damage and instead of getting hurt they would drop health pick ups in the form of milk orbs or something.

I also started working on the FMV version of their model (the head and body aren't finished yet but the most important part is!)

There's actually a lot of new technique-y stuff going on in this shot- To get the squishing on the nectar reserve as he sucks I created a rig of a bunch of lattices and made them children of various parts of his face (and animated that as a "3rd character" so the multiple lattice has a loop like Gyra's rig and the Lactant's rig)

In the background the trees have a tiiiiny bit of animation (accomplished also with lattices)

And to give the background/foreground some more contrast I put some fake lens flare things behind them:

The fluid for this shot was made using the Fluidlab add-on, which as I've mentioned is unstable and kind of cumbersome to work with but works well for this kind of shot. Like the quality isn't as good as real fluid sim would give but it was substantially faster to go from nothing to final fluid bake than with FLIP. And I wanted to get this done fast! It's not my best character animation but I did it all (modeling and texturing of the Lactant, finishing up some of Gyra's rig that was incomplete and animating everything and adding fluid and dynamics) in ~3 days! And since it is supposed to be FMV in a late 90s inspired pre-rendered graphics style some subpar character animation here and there is excusable I think.

That's kind of why I haven't been posting much and looking at comments/messages... I've been pulling all nighters/dayers trying to implement this FMV sequence into the game because like... it just scratches a weird itch, I had to make it happen!!! (plus I finally got to record VA I needed to make some kind of intro FMV... so I can work on that at some point) I'd like to do a couple other simpler shots before showing it in conjunction with gameplay (like one where we see the Lactant giving him a knowing look from his POV before the suck sequence then a simple looping animation of the suck you can watch after that and then exit it whenever you want)

Also want to say, again, sorry for not posting more and having more animation done... I got stupidly side tracked by this and like... the vision of what this could be was all I can think about (and it's involved a lot of programming stuff for the other monster behaviors and tweaking combat and stuff). It might not be as great as I imagine, like gameplay might be subpar, might have some jank taste to it... BUT at least it'll have cool naughty FMVs!