Shantanu Nair - Commando Weed

Commando Weed Animation in Unity (Front View)

Commando Weed Animation in Unity (3/4 View)

Commando Weed

The final enemy of "Smokin' Weeds" is the "Commando Weed". It is the most unconventional foe, featuring 2 means of attack, a melee attack, and a launcher that fires homing missiles at the player. As the most powerful enemy, I needed the enemy to look imposing.

To the right was the original design of the Commando Weed. I had imagined a creature with the physique of a bodybuilder, with even more exaggerated proportions. I specifically looked at Arnold Schwarzenegger for the body shape and looked at the main villain from 'Ben 10', named Vilgax, for the arm musculature. The result was the concept on the right.

Commando Weed Sketch

Original Mesh

Original Mesh with Textures

When I started creating this creature, I felt it had the most unique design, along with the Club Weed, and, similar to that creature, I created a version of the character that wouldn't stray too far from the original. The result was the creature on the left. Similar to my other weeds, I made this creature mostly out of bezier curves and tapered bezier curves. I created 7 animations for this creature: Spawning, idle, attacking, getting injured, dying, and firing a missile.

Similar to the original whip weed, upon implementing the character in-game, the creature did not look good. Compared to my other 3 weeds (I had the remastered Whip Weed in by this point), the Commando Weed looked extremely stiff and blocky, and the texturing was extremely haphazard. I still wished to salvage some elements of the original design such as the single eye and the tendrils forming a cowl around the weed. My next iteration retained those aspects while using the wrapping technique I had used for the whip weed, except on the body of a well built man. The result was the model on the right.

I was not satisfied with the model on the right, the shrinkwrapping technique which had worked wonders for me on the whip weed did not look good on this version. It looked very inconsistent with the rest of the weeds in-game and didn't look cartoonish enough. It looked much too human.

Commando Weed Iteration 2

AI Generated Image 1

AI Generated Image 2

New Commando Weed Torso

New Commando Weed Head

Complete Commando Weed

Given that the same attempt in 2 different ways didn't work, I changed up my approach. For this weed, I decided to take inspiration from my previous favorite design, the "Club Weed", while making one major change between this creature and the others: Abandoning vines along the body that were common among the other weeds. Since those were giving me the most trouble, I decided the model would be better off without them.

I recreated the body out of a sphere which I sculpted to look like a torso, I used a multi-plane scrape along with a mirror modifier to add texture and bumpiness to the model, to make it look spiky. I had also created arms separately, but upon rigging them, there were gaps between the arms and the torso. I remedied this by sculpting the arms from the torso. The result is on the left (see: New Commando Weed Torso).

With the torso created in a way I was satisfied with, I started making the rest of the creature. Similar to the Club Weed, I used a set of tapered curves as a neckpiece and sculpted a humanoid head with giant eyes and various indentations. The head was inspired by Spider-Man.

I redesigned the missile launcher to be based off a tree rather than the traditional machine used by this weed's predecessor, I connected the new launcher with some curves to resemble vines and the new version was complete.

For materials, I wanted the creature to be mostly green with a black head, and the launcher itself would be shades of brown, because of its resemblance to a tree, since I was using a custom shader I decided to be a little more experimental with the materials.

The animations would stay the same as its predecessor's, with the new musculature enabling more dynamic posing. Since the creature featured two attacks, both required different kinds of animation. The swing was simple enough but had to feel heavy, I put a lot of emphasis on the character rearing back before the swing.

The Fire animation was quite unique, in the first version, I had assumed that firing a bazooka would shift the momentum upwards, until I looked into missile firing recoil animation in other games. Looking at those, I noticed that the character's full body moves backwards when firing a missile, so rather than adjust the arm that's shooting out of the aiming pose, I just bent the waist and it made the animation look more natural.

When I put him into Unity, I used the toon shader I had used on the other 3 weeds and created the animation controller on the right.

Material Preview (NOTE: This is using my custom shader)

Animator Controller

Commando Weed - Paint Shader

Paint Shader

With the implementation in Unity complete, I went ahead to create an image render in Blender. I created a pot and a room for the character to be in. I made the walls out of a geometric wallpaper and the floor out of the same wood as the one I used for the whip weed. I replicated the Unity Toon shader in Blender for the plant and the pot, while the rest of the scene used the default Blender shader and textures downloaded from 3dtextures.me. I created 2 renders, for the first: I put the character in the middle of the fire animation and added custom explosion effects. For the second render, I put him in the middle of the attack animation.

I wanted to experiment with paint shading and so I created a paint shader inspired by Riot Games' "Arcane".