Meet The Eldritch Elderlings In AI War 2
These are for an upcoming DLC, part of the foes that will sometimes face off against the Necromancer (an evil player faction). The Elderlings are some of the Neinzul who are not exactly small and unassuming, and the Eldritch ones are the largest of all.
Democracy, who is working on the DLC, asked if I could do one that looked like it was glowing -- born from a star. I said sure, and pulled out a vertex-animated shader and made something that was... blinding and kind of boring. However, in a video I made to show him some options, I accidentally turned the rim power (this is partially a rim shader) negative. That changes light into darkness, and that was immediately interesting to him. The initial visual effect was pretty tacky, so we refined that to get the proper mix of eldritch darkness and star-lit fire in the center.
In the end, we wound up not with just a shader (I had to update it to work with gpu instancing fully) and material for the eldritch elderling... but one for TWO, and also a new visual style for the elderlings in general.
Democracy really prefers the red fiery one, which looks like it comes from a Red Giant star. I'm really fond of that, but also really love the golden one that burns green at the edges of the blackness -- I've seen some false-color images of our own sun that match that style, and it fascinates me. So we're going to have two Eldritch Elderlings possible, visually and lore-wise, even if potentially they have the same in-game abilities.
And then there in the back, there's a very dark and evil looking elderling, which is the material/shader I'm going to use on some different forms for the other elderlings. This gives them a much more cohesive identity visually, and they are meant to terrify the necromancer, so this is great!
Also fun? If you recognize this particular model, it's a scuplt I did for the Dark Zenith, their engineer or something along those lines, but doubled and recombined and flipped sideways, then animated into freaky arms.