The Mystery of the Burnt HUMAN Face in Gmod and Half Life 2 (corpse01.mdl)

corpse01 honestly always looked so out of place and realistic compared to the rest of half-life's artstyle

One thing people should know when going into the medical field, if you cannot handle gore and visually disturbing things, the medical field is not right for you. Text books show these images not to shock or educate, but to prepare future doctors of what they may see while on the job. They show the worst case scenario. That way, the doctors don’t freak out, lose their bearings, and even puke or faint upon seeing some of the worst injuries that can happen to a person.

the way they edited the model made it look a lot creepier than the actual image they used

Ive always had a fear of this model because i always had that subconscious thought that the body looked way too real to just be made by a really good texture artist and the worry that valve used and still does use real life examples for there textures and models, well i guess now we know they not only used the living but also the dead for their characters

It isn't stated anywhere in the book, but since there is multiple pictures of the same corpse with different levels of burn injuries, I personally think that this guy was already dead before his face was burnt and the corpse donated for medical research. Likely for researching facial deformities in burn victims.

Fun Fact: The reason why people know that L4D was gonna have actual deformed faces from real people was because of it's Developer Commentary in L4D2. In the campaign: The Parish, one of the commantary notes is how one guy in the team of L4D was using types of deformed faces as a reference to make the zombies look more "realistic". This was scrapped for well... you know.

another example of game developers studying real life gore is dead space, where they used car crash victims as inspiration for the necromorphs.

i love the trigger warning for "game development", this is why your one of the greats

No need to worry about the face of the classic zombie though. They literally just took Male_09's face and made his skin pale and added fake blood.

it's kinda funny how the in-game model is totally fine to show on youtube even though it's literally just the original picture with the right side of the face mirrored

4:35 actually the reason why there’s a burned body in hl2 in the first place is that there was a cut npc called the cremator that burned dead bodies if I remember correctly

I'm actually not at all shocked to learn it's a real face. It's so much more detailed than any other gore in the game, it always just felt out of place.

My friends had a inside joke where we called the corpse harry. Imagine having your face burnt off then being used as the hl2 corpse or the gmod hobo. Also is it just me or does it look like its smiling?

Another example of disturbing imagery of humans as reference pictures for games is BioShock, so basically what happened was that Ken Levine (the guy who made BioShock) showed some of the devs at Irrational Games pictures of early attempts at plastic surgery after World War 1 (called Project Facade), these pictures were used as the base for some of the designs of the splicers, the main people that were used was Walter Yeo (used as the base for the Waders splicers) and Henry Ralph Lumley (used as the base for the Toasty splicers)

the modded reskin actually looked kinda creepier than the older one, but its more comfortable knowing that it isnt a burnt corpse.

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At first, I searched it up and my reaction was like: "heh, so that's how he looks like" Now I'm forever thinking about it too much 💀

I can just imagine Gabe Newell yelling at someone to stop using real gore in the game

Seeing a picture of the man with only the face blurred makes it scarier to me

Now it kind of makes me wonder, how did people find out about the model's texture origins? And more importantly, where did Valve get the idea to use the image? Did they think the model needed to be realistic? Did they grab up whichever "creepy" image they could find? Still I can see why after finding out, people would be uncomfortable with it (I know I would). I think certain movies did something similar too, like Poltergeist (1982).