This is a recreation of a scary dream I had when I was very young, maybe four or five years old. It’s the oldest dream I can remember and one of my oldest memories period.

The dream was just that a goat appeared laying across the bookshelf in the room (we were staying in a guest room at my grandparents’ house), and its body somehow took up the entire length of the bookshelf, extended like the body of a Chinese dragon.

I didn’t know back then that in popular culture goats are associated with evil, but nonetheless I found it very scary.

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Modeling

I used an architecture add-on for Blender to quickly create the room with windows. I borrowed the furniture models and textures from previous projects, Tiered Mansion and Penthouse Platform.

To save time, I started with a ready-made goat model that I paid a couple bucks to download. I added geometry to extend its body, and did some careful texture mapping so that the original colors wouldn’t be stretched on the new body (instead, the texture actually mirrors itself twice as you go down the length of the body, but this isn’t noticeable in the final image).

The model came pre-rigged, so it was easy to pose its head and legs in a natural laying down position.

Importantly, I added a particle system to the goat model to simulate hair. Hair is never easy to do in 3D, but it went considerably better than last time. There are just a lot of steps (hair length, shape, number, randomness, clumping, color, direction), and some steps need to be done in the right order.

Composition

The challenging thing about this image was that it needed to be dark, and that made it hard to create emphasis where it was needed. In my dream, everything was barely visible, almost pitch black. That added to the creepiness of it, which is the feeling I wanted to convey, but it doesn’t make for a very engaging image. So I added some plausible light sources to the scene: simulated moonlight coming through the window, and a dim point light (like a nightlight) in the opposite corner, out of view.

But neither of these lights could feasibly emphasize the subject of the image, the goat. Realistically, there just wouldn’t be any light hitting above the bookshelf. So I also added a big area light (like a flat panel of light) behind the goat, and configured it to only affect the goat, not anything else in the room.  This gave the goat its ghostly illumination, which works to draw the eye there without destroying the realism in the rest of the room.

I also used post-production to make the goat’s body fade into black as it stretches into the corner. I needed to add mystery there, because the full view of this impossibly-elongated goat would inspire more curiosity than fear. To an awake adult, it just looked kind of silly. I wanted the weirdness of it to contribute to a feeling of creepiness, as it did in the dream I had.

And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too