Loyal Luggage - Stylised Mimic
What started as a test to see what I could do using Zbrush (and some hard surface brushes I snagged on sale), quickly spiralled into a full project to bring a concept by the wonderful Jess Barrett to life in 3d. With this I was keen to try my hand at hard surface work I only briefly touched before - exaggerating the sculpt and putting my skills at organics toward a non human subject. Over all, despite time overruns, I'm super happy with the result, the extra time spent in Substance to get the metallics *just so* and the switch to Marmoset Toolbag 4 has left me throughly impressed with lighting and reflections I would have struggled with otherwise.
Further improvements could most certainly be made, a fully animatable rig, more post work to emphasize movement among other touch ups here and there to normal detailing would be great, but can be saved for the next time. This wouldn't have been possible without the wonderful Jess, go check out the original concept and her profile here!:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3dWE6B
https://jessbarrett96.artstation.com/
Being the first time I've tried sculpting hard and soft surfaces, I think it's come out really well and certainly helped me with Zbrush in future!
Normal capture to test the newly added "passes" feature in TB4, super useful!
Adobe has greatly improved the Subsurface scattering provided by Substance Painter, getting me some great colour in the teeth reflected off the tongue, somthing much more fiddly in my previous uses of it.
I love how the leather and gold has come out, it looks simple but as I found, it's a deceptive balance of subtle texture and geo based detailing combined with a limited range of .3 - .5 roughness values.
The highest poly version capture from Zbrush, minus some baking artifacts, it was retopologised down 2 16,863 polygons from over 3.3 million points!