Disclaimer: everything that follows is the result of what I think and is in no way connected or endorsed by my employer.

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.