It's no secret that I've been enjoying working in Doom Emacs for the better half of the past year (I wrote about it here: /doom-emacs-handbook/). So it shouldn't come as too big of a surprise that I decided to pay homage to the programmable text editor for martian hackers with a small 3d asset inspired by the cute cacodemon icon created by jaidetree in their popular repo: https://github.com/jaidetree/doom-icon .

This^ cacodemon is coming for you

I have modeled procedurally most of its base shape in Houdini, and then did a bit of sculpting in Blender. The very few textures that I have used were hand painted in Substance Painter.

It's very far from being a professional model (some parts still look quite flat, and I hate some of the shadows in the final renders), but overall I'm happy with the general look considering it's just a small side project and I'm no longer doing as much real 3d work at my $dayjob as I used to "back in the days".

Here's a screengrab from when I starting working on the procedural base in Houdini:

And this is the initial Lookdev in Blender:

As with all side projects that I undertake, I have also pushed myself to learn something new. I had never really used Blender due to its relatively "weird" UX compared to other industry standard DCCs, but I have to admit that over the past years the Blender team has done a terrific job at polishing everything and making it a very appealing competitor to Maya, at least for more basic things. In fact, I think that my favourite pipeline ever would be a Houdini (for big scale procedural work) + Blender (for destructive stuff) one, since I have found that doing lookdev in Blender is a very enjoyable process.

Here, have another render!

Make it real!

I have also spent a bit of time ensuring that the 3d asset is easily printable, since I have the ultimate goal of painting my own real cacodemon.

In the following link you will find the Sketchfab version, which I exported as USDZ from Houdini after assigning a few basic MaterialX shaders in Solaris: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/doom-cacodemon-923becaf8202497388c25dab0b3bd9e7. The asset is freely available under Creative Commons, as long as AI people don't put their sticky fingers on it to train their silly little models (#noai).

A screengrab of a previous iteration, only posted here because I like how it feels that the cacodemon is eating the supports. Chomp chomp.