The Making Of

By Adam Stone

The Rake

Idea OriginsA creepypasta, in short, is a scary campfire story that is shared, created and adapted online. For my Adaptation B project I was thinking of exploring and adapting the world of creepypastas, so I did some research into the best ones. I kept in mind the potential for short stories and plausible yet interesting characters. The one that stuck out for me was definitely 'The Rake'.

The Rake is a creepypasta story about a territorial creature that torments your thoughts, warning you away from its land. It watches you while you sleep, invades your dreams and when you are at your worst, it will come for you.

It will arrive in your house one fateful night, bent on killing and your entire household.

Initial IdeaMy first design struck as very generic and uninteresting. I wasn’t pushing the boundaries of design enough.

Needing More

After these few designs I realised I needed more influence to make it more interesting, so I dug through different stories about The Rake. Doing this gave me noting too useful and I found myself wanting more to link it to. I needed a motive for this creature to be tormenting people and I needed a setting which would give it a distinctive look.

Linking To AnimalsI attempted to link the creature to some animals that people find inherently scary in an attempt to vary it up a bit.

Other InfluencesLinking to Animals was a bit of a failure so I looked at other sources of myths and stories. This led me to look to old American folk lore stories and religion.

Looking into Demons I found a certain demon in Buddhism, called the Preta, that strongly resembles the stories of The Rake, only with more descriptive details.

The StoryThe Rake is a creature that haunts you in your dreams. it will appear at the end of your bed one night with a fierce hunger for violence.

It tends to appear in remote wooded areas, usually hiding within the terrain. It’s a territorial being that usually keeps to its sorry self unless provoked or angered by humans that enter its territory.

It is not some random beast from the woods. It’s a cursed demon known as a Preta. The Preta are a group of lesser known demons and under different circumstances we would probably feel sorry for the demons, but you see, the extreme hunger and thirst a Preta experiences can make them do some nasty things to humans. Pretas desperately wander the world in constant search of food and water but can not eat or drink. As a result, they become evil spirits that possess weak-minded men and women and corrupt them by making them incredibly greedy and slothful in an attempt to satisfy their own hunger and thirst. It becomes progressively more angry as it watches you gorge yourself on food and pleasantries, eventually appearing on the end of your bed in a rage that only ends in either your death, or the death of your entire household. The more people that it disposes of, the more cursed and deformed the creature becomes.

Change of DirectionTaking reference from my new story, I decided to use trees to collage together a new design concept for my creature. This gave it a very earthy, twisted and deformed look which complements the idea that he’s a territorial creature that hides itself and becomes more and more twisted with every person that it kills.

Collaging Trees

Collaging Trees: Paintovers

Collaging Trees: Paintovers

Creating Heads from Branches

Creating The Bodies

Deciding the Final DesignI chose this as my final design for the rake because it was the most interesting and it looked like a bit of a challenge to model in Maya. However to begin modelling the creature, I had to mark out the form of the creature more clearly.

Mudbox ExperimentsI began testing the modelling process in Mudbox, it let me quickly see if the creatures head would work in 3D.

Mudbox ExperimentsModelling it quickly in Mudbox also let me check to see if certain expressions would work without a conventional mouth.

Mudbox OrthographicsIn an attempt to use something practical from my Mudbox experiments, I attempted to use them as orthographics for a proper Maya model.

Failing at Conventual ModellingThese were the results of attempting to model my creature conventionally. As seen below, it didn’t give the desired results that I was looking for.

Pannel Modelling Because modelling with orthographics and modelling conventually wasn't working. It was decided that I should begin modelling it panel by panel, which I’d never done before, so it prooved a time-consuming excersize that paid off in terms of looks.

Modelling I achieved much better results with this method. However it did take me a while to complete because I had to figure out how to sow all the panels together once they were completed.

UVs Due to time constrictions I made an executive decision and decided not to skin and rig the creature and focus on creating UVs and Textures to fit the model.

UV Maps

UV Textures

Final Renders

The Rake By Adam Stone

Find out more at: adamrichardstone.blogspot.co.uk