Shantanu Nair - Radio Demon

Video render

Radio Demon

I recently learned about A24's show "Hazbin Hotel", and I grew to really like the show and its characters, in particular, Alastor, the "Radio Demon". I really wanted to try creating him in 3D to further improve my skills in stylized humanoid modeling.

In contrast to Hakumen, there was no shortage of reference material for how to model this character. I observed how others had approached modeling this character to find a place to start, gathered a variety of reference material from the show and started modeling from there.

I created an initial version of the character by trying to sculpt a lower poly version to generally get the shape and then continue from there, but found the process to require too much minute modeling and chose to start over.

Initial Head & Torso

Limb 1

All limbs

Body and coat tails from the front

Body and coat tails from the side

Body & Head

Head Detailing

Mouth

Lens

I started by modeling the general shape of the head and torso as those were the most unique shapes. The head was egg shaped while the torso is triangular with flat sides where the shoulders and arms meet. In addition, he has a curved neck. All of these were created primarily through sculpting 3 spheres. I chose to sculpt over doing regular transformations as Alastor's body has a lot of curves owing to the hand-drawn nature of the show.

After creating the body shape, I created the coat tail by using a cube to help symmetrize the shape and smoothed it out. I then stretched the top to make the coattails attach to the bottom of the jacket. The bottom of Alastor's coat has tears in it and I created those by just cutting them out with a boolean and cylinder.

After creating the general shape of the body and coat, I moved on to the head. Alastor's toothy grin is a very distinctive part of the character, he's almost never seen without a smile. I sculpted out two eye holes and a wide smile. created a sphere for the eyes and put two cylinders for the pupils and irises. I just pulled out the nose and added teeth to the mouth cavity. I also added his monocle, which is a subtle detail but he doesn't look complete without it.

With the head sculpting complete, I finished the head by doing his hair, these were created out of sculpted spheres. The reference material for this was a bit more challenging as Alastor's hair is drawn in one smooth shape, which isn't particularly realistic. I chose to make his hair multiple large, sculpted shapes to correspond with where the cuts are and just made them symmetrical across both ends and filled them out along the back of his head. For the front of his head, I just duplicated some of the side strands and curved them to match the reference material without changing the width, to maintain some of the realism. For his ears, I did something similar but just had them taper to a point and layered them to evoke the idea of them being furry. For his horns, I made them by sculpting out a nurbs curve & adding a taper.

With the head and hair complete, I moved onto detailing his torso. For here, I just sculpted out the collar and cross to add more depth and realism.

Hair

Coat sculpting

Limb sculpting

Final Body sculpt

Staff and character

With the main body complete, all that was left were the limbs. These are just drawn as rectangles in the show, making them very straightforward to sculpt. I just created cylinders and pulled out the bottom as cufflinks. For the hands, I reused Hakumen's hands and just elongated the fingertips, and the feet I just sculpted some basic shoes out of a sphere, thus ending the sculpting of the character.

For his staff, I just sculpted the top part out of a sphere and created the rest of it using primitives.

With the sculpting complete, I rigged the model. I rigged it similar to a basic humanoid and added a lower jaw in case I wanted to open his mouth. I then weight painted it and tried to pose him. Initially, I had started with texturing and shading, but felt it was more important to get him in the right pose and then see how I'd have to create the color and light.

I scoured the internet for poses to put him in, I considered an action pose with tentacles similar to his fight with Adam in the finale, but I already did action poses for all my other models and wanted this one to stand out in a different way. One of Alastor's defining traits is his charisma, as well as his tendency to present himself in control of every situation. One of the more important moments of the show is when the protagonist of the show makes a deal with him. I put him in the pose he is in when he makes that deal, with one arm outstretched and his staff behind his back. Upon posing him, I started texturing, shading and rendering.

When texturing him, there was some ambiguity with his color scheme as his pilot color scheme had a much darker red tone to it, while in the show proper, there are times where his coloring is a lot more of a deep pink. I started with the pink tone but then chose to go with the red tone since it's more recognizable as his primary color. As this is an animated character and I wanted to stick to that hand-drawn feeling, I chose to only use color maps and a custom shader.

Alastor Rig

Alastor Posed

Beginning Texturing

Completed texturing

Wireframe

Flat Shading

Material Preview

Render Preview

For shading, I stuck to a cel shaded style, similar to my other works. I attempted to include a cross-hatching pattern but I found it looked too distracting and took away from the character.

I then added an outline to make it look more like an illustration. I created an environment to evoke the feeling of the hotel with a lot of reds and browns as well as a velvet floor.

The initial final render looked quite boring so to make the render more interesting, I finished it by adding an animated green flame to Alastor's hand. The reference for this comes from the second episode, where he produces a green flame to scare someone.

I revisited the character as I wanted to make him look more exciting. I took reference from the 2nd episode where he assumes his "partial demon" form. He also assumes this form when he makes his deal with Charlie.

I made the new pupils using roughly the same method I used on the original eyes where I just made a high poly circle rather than an oval and cut out some parts to create the radio dial look, reused the red texture on the pupils and made the eyes just pure black.

For the horns, I looked at the full demon render on the wiki, which is taken from episode 5. I made these the same way I did the original horns. I had to redo the grease pencil and made some edits to it to make the model look more appealing, creating the renders below.

I made the model more screen accurate by narrowing his head and polishing the outlines.