Elder Wing - Possessed Pilot
With the kind permission of the fabulous Jesse Turner ( go find the original concept here!: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/PoX6w8 ), I was able to bring their ElderWing Pilot to life with my standard character pipeline of Zbrush, 3DS Max, Photoshop, Substance Painter and Marmoset over the last few months in my spare time.
This was a great project to do as a first attempt at sculpting a stylised mesh and a great excuse to put into practice my knowledge gained from other character practice. It was also a good chance to invest in some timesaving tools from the marketplace that would allow me to reinvest time and effort into other sectors for polish. In paticular these were my top picks, and along with Jesse kindly granting permission, allowed this project to really take shape:
- https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/R3vB/stylized-texture-generator-for-substance-painter?utm_source=artstation&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=homepage&utm_term=marketplace
Pictures are good, videos are better, but Marmoset embeds are better. Full turntable avalible to inspect. While I wouldn't call myself a technical artist or an animator, I like to think I did well with this.
Designed to run in realtime, this mesh has been optmised using a combination of manual and automatic retopology. Saving time in places like the helmet to re-invest in joints such as the fingers.
Jumpsuit texture layout. Since I didn't have a paticular camera distance in mind, I stuck with a fairly average texel density to not leave any super low-res areas. In future, minor improvements could be made to optimse areas like sleeves and shoe layout.
Fitting all the headgear on this sheet was a bit of a squeeze but was ultimately the right call. And matches the fidelity of the suit nicely.