The process of creating this antagonist started with a base Mixamo mesh – I wanted something with that distinctly human silhouette but needed to transform it into something more unsettling. The idea was to create this figure that looks like someone’s had burlap cloth roughly sewn onto their body, creating this unsettling effect where it’s clearly humanoid but wrong in all the right ways.
Looking at the mesh topology here, I used Cinema 4D’s deformer tools to create these organic-looking bulges and irregularities that suggest poorly sewn patches of burlap. The wireframe really shows how I manipulated the base mesh, those denser polygon clusters around the joints and torso create these natural-looking fabric bunches. Working with the deformer was crucial for achieving that patchwork effect. Built up layers of subtle deformation, focusing on areas where you’d expect the burlap to bunch up or strain against the underlying form. Those bulging sections around the chest and shoulders help sell the idea that this is fabric stretched and stitched over a human frame.
I used Cinema 4D’s noise deformer to create two distinct but complementary surfaces (one of them just had the same noise displacement but with inverted height). The red and blue colouring really helps visualise how I split the burlap patches. Each colour represents a different mesh that was deformed with inverse noise patterns, creating this interlocking patchwork effect that’ll become the foundation for the sewn-together look.
The way the patches interlock is crucial for selling that cobbled-together aesthetic. Using inverse noise patterns means where one mesh bulges out, the other dips in – creates these natural-looking seam lines where the “fabric pieces” meet. Playing with the noise scale and intensity helped achieve those organic, irregular transitions between patches that make it look like someone actually stitched this thing together by hand.
After the initial noise deformation, had to clean up the mesh distribution to make it more practical for UE5’s vertex painting workflow. Smoothed out some of the more chaotic noise patterns and consolidated the patches into larger, more defined sections. The cleaner separation between red and blue areas will make it much easier to paint different material properties onto each section in Unreal’s vertex painting system.
I set the simulation weights to zero specifically along those stitched borders – you can see where the green highlights trace the seams between patches. This precise weight distribution ensures the cloth physics respond realistically while maintaining the overall humanoid form.
As you can see here the cloth bulges out, which took me a while to realise why it was happening. The whole time I was working with a mesh that hadn’t been hollowed out! I fix this and clean it up later on in development.