To refresh my mind, having spent a while getting to grips with UE5’s nodes and blueprints, I started playing around with C4D to create a poster to have on a wall. I made the eyes without pupils so I could potentially add functionality for them to follow the player around the room when things get more scary and stressful as the game goes on. I chose for there to be three characters to mirror the three antagonists/ hazards in the game.
Going with this vintage kid’s show aesthetic for “Burlap Friends” – I rendered the initial shot with deliberate golden hour lighting to emphasize texture and create this artificial warmth. The burlap material catches light in an interesting way, giving the character this uncanny quality even in its most “friendly” form. Positioned it on a victory podium with a “#1” marker – standard promotional material composition, deliberately generic.
The post-processing transformation pushes it into psychological horror territory. Added a blue-to-red gradient skyline that mimics those 80s horror posters, complete with VHS degradation and film grain. The wear patterns aren’t random – concentrated them around the edges and corners to suggest years of neglect. Dark processing makes those white eyes more prominent, creates this sense of watching.
The creases and rips are somewhat parallel to the aesthetic I’m going for, kind of like a distorted, neglected VHS tape. For environmental storytelling, I want to integrate this fictional franchise’s history into the room itself. Torn poster placement, scattered merchandise, old promotional materials – all serving as breadcrumbs and hinting to an alternate timeline where these toys exist.
Here I add circular planes where I want the eyes to be, and create blueprints so that I can implement functionality later on.
Making the eyes follow the player around was a challenge. I was essentially mapping 2d movement within a texture to reflect a player in 3d space, the initial idea was to map the player position on the floor as a 2d object and move the eyes accordingly, but this required so much trial and error. This way of development really pushed me to learn how the event graph works in unreal, and acted as the basis for my understanding later on, the functionality of the nodes above essentially have the eyes snap to the player once they stand in front of the poster, since the eye movements (following them around) were so janky and I really didn’t like the result.
I initially had two planes on top of each other, but opted to dynamically alter an instanced material instead. This meant that I could have the pupil move beyond the constraints of the whole eye, making it look more three dimensional, but this functionality proves redundant until I am able to complete this game in my own time.