The Shambling Mound is covered in a thick matting of vegetation dotted with fungi and other rotting materials. It's "face" was compromised by a thick gnarl of roots which extended underneath it's body and acted as a rudimentary support structure for the rest of it's mass. Two unblinking eyes were placed to help with the semblance of a face. It's chest is burst open with what appears to be a ribcage of root's twisted outwards. Instead of an innard of guts, a blooming of flowers spills outwards as a nice contrast to the rest of the mound's vegetation.
After conception, I began creation of a high poly asset which I later carried over into a complete low poly asset. Being shorthanded at the time, I was also charged with rigging and setting up the skeleton to be used by animators for export into the game itself.
Although I was mainly assigned to work on the variety of character models featured in Mask of the Betrayer, there were times when I was given the time to work on a creature or two. The Shambling Mound was one of them and one that I saw thru at every step from beginning to end.
I had never heard of a Shambling Mound before starting work on the expansion and when it was assigned to me I decided to do the research upon it to see exactly what it was I need to create.
Here is official image of a Shambling Mound. It was basically described as an animate pile of compost. As I dug around in my research, I discovered that the Shambling Mound had actually been a swamp-thing type creature during it's
early conceptions.
Given permission to create our own take on the Shambling Mound for the game, I concepted a rough image to basically convey features I liked from the original concept along with some other features I thought would be neat.
