Late Night Drive

Just out for a late-night stroll. Hey what are those too bright lights coming towards me at a high rate of speed?

Another autumn day another spooky poster courtesy of me and SFM. And it's an unusual and obscure reference being based off of Ghouls from the indie horror game cursed 2 released recently in 2022. It's an awesome throwback trilogy of games based heavily off of Nintendo horror classics such as uninvited which I've seen multiple let's plays of through the series.

This was based off the way you encounter the ghouls which is you drive around a small town in the truck and they run up beside you when you're driving and you have to hit them with a hammer ( or any weapon I suppose ) to fight them off. The sound they make I think is from splatter house but it totally sounds like freaking Michael Jackson which is made all the more hilarious the way they tumble backwards which amused me greatly.

There's technically a 2nd inspiration for this which I forgot to mention which much like the you can't rest now image is inspired where I grew up living in southern Oklahoma surrounded either by open plains or farmland. Occasionally there are small forest and trees dotted around creeks but it's usually just flat. And when riding home late at night after traveling somewhere and staring out the window ( I was a kid in the 90s ) I'd have these creepy thoughts about what if something was running next to the car or came out of one of those fields.

It got pretty freaking dark with only the headlights lighting up the road in front definitely making the eeriness factor sky rocket. Hence my creepy imaginings. Cursed 2 definitely reminded me of these thoughts long since buried over decades giving me the inspiration for this.

The concept was fairly simple although the hard part was going to be re-creating the ghouls from the game which the way I described it has being a velociraptor leach things in the notes meant I had to cobble it together out of multiple models, or so I thought. Turns out that's not remotely what it looks like minus maybe it's mouth but finding a good image of the damn thing, was really freaking hard!

I consider just downloading a video from YouTube and taking a screenshot but said screw it I'll just go with the jockey from left 4 dead 2. I was just going to add on team fortress 2 cosmetics to make it's head look different but after futzing around and just coloring it dark it came out amazingly. I use the coloring rig and once the blur effect and seeing through the window ( which I think I did one with and one without and the window up looked better ) was added it completely change the model especially the head looking straight up like some kind of burnt ghost or charred body with the face looking more skeletal.

It came out way better than I intended or could have blowing away my expectations. I 1st had to create the animation then unlock the jockey from everything else which is how I got things leveled with only slight adjustments then I could use the rig. This is something I think I knew about earlier but just forgot but it's definitely something I need to remember when trying to color objects when they're in an animation and are locked to something else.

Note this was in its own separate session so there was no need to work around the animation in a different scene when trying to make another poster. And yes I did find a barbed wire fence model finally but of course it's textures are corrupt and it emits light constantly so thanks for that valve! So I used it anyway as well as building my own little road map with farmland next to it which I had to do a lot of it so I could move the car and monster. And finding the right car was also difficult due to a variety of factors has it had to look somewhat realistic from the inside with me going through several different vehicles until I could get the right one.

The kid I wanted to be different from the other kid I used who I don't think he has a name just being called child as a prop so I decided to use the scout has I had done before. But needless to say it's not quite what I wanted it to look like an much like the closet image he looks a tad too old for what I was going for. They're just not a lot of children props on the workshop that are realistic or match the TF2 style and yes I altered the sizes of his head and body to make it look smaller and younger but he's mostly covered in darkness so it doesn't really work.

Also fun fact his arm isn't technically touching the door which it's supposed to look like it is has if it was it just looks sort of off so I adjusted it to where it look like it was touching. The lighting was also an issue but worked out fine in the end has I had to light up the inside of the car to make it look like the headlights were doing it as well as the monster also being lit up by the headlights.

Overall the imageworks especially the fantastically creepy monster running along the side, ( and this definitely takes place in the past has he's not got a smart phone glued to his face lol ) so I was mostly successful minus a few hiccups in succeeding in this one.

So if you too had well enjoyed this image I've got 3 more and a bonus coming throughout the last days of October to finish up the spooky season as I continue my creepy uploads throughout the final days of the Halloween month