Hello, Concept artist here! (Dayna)

After developing the  main idea of our lava biome, it was time to start thinking about how to bring matching enemies to the game. The process was fairly simple- I go through a range of different shapes, move them around until I  find a combination I like.  We knew from the start that they need to stand out against the darker environment. lava was the easier and most effective way!

Here are a few examples of the range lava enemy concepts.

I then confirmed with my Creative Director one which concept would best suit/stand out the most. This process was repeated for the tank lava enemy.

In the end, these are our three confirmed concepts for our ranged, melee and tank enemies.

Then moved onto our 3D character artist (Elmin)!

The modelling process for both the tank and range enemy didn't take too long. As I used rocks that I made before, I just reshaped the rocks so it would suit the enemy more and making them look like it's actually apart of its body. I followed concepts and tired some new things just to give the enemy or depth. Once I finished the model had issues with the UV's so had to spend time redoing them quite a bit but in the end it worked out.

When onto texturing the model I got to used the rock and lava material that I used for Steve(Melee lava enemy). For the range enemy I had a generator which would have lava cracks near the body of the range enemy. Also had another generator which had ash on the topside of the model.

For the tank it was very much the same as the range enemy when it came to texturing. There was a bit of issues with the UV's and had to reimport the model back in and fixed the UV's in Maya. 

After the character had been modelled and textured it was then sent off to our 3D character animator (Derek)!

The rigging and skin weighting  didn't take too long as he had a humanoid shape. This allowed me to utilise mayas quick rig and re-adjust the bones and skin weights so that they lined up correct with the lava enemies body structure.

(Lava Range Death)

(Lava Tank Death)