I began adding some Burlap Friends around the room, starting with a setup on the bookshelf. Their white eyes and teeth make perfect focal points in the dark. I placed them at varying heights to naturally guide the player’s eyes upward, creating and pushing the sense of something looming over them.
I’m particularly happy with how the shelf placement worked out – having them at different levels creates this sense of being watched from multiple angles. There’s something deeply unsettling about their expressions being just barely visible in the shadows. I’ve got plans to make those eyes functional later, adding some subtle rotational tracking so they follow the player’s movement. Should be pretty straightforward to implement – just need to set up a simple look-at system tied to the player’s position, but make it subtle enough that players might question whether they really saw the eyes move or not.
I started modeling these Burlap Friends in Cinema 4D, really focusing on getting that balance between rough texture and soft form that makes them feel unsettling but still toy-like. The base mesh was pretty simple – just a sphere that I deformed to get those initial chunky shapes, but the real character came from layering different effects.
Using a combination of subdivision surface modifiers and displacers turned out to be key for achieving that specific look I wanted. The subdivision surface gives them that overall smooth, plush toy feel, while the displacers create all those subtle bumps and irregularities you’d expect from burlap fabric. I set up multiple displacer effectors with different noise patterns – you can see in the hierarchy how I’ve got them organized for each character variation.
The way the stitches follow that V-pattern really emphasizes the patchwork nature of these toys. I positioned the UV islands so that the stitch lines would fall in places that make sense structurally