Cultist Bard (fan made skin)

Personal project: Bard Cultist.
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This has been another fun project.
I would like to start talking about the reference.
As you can see I've changed it a little bit by using AI, mainly because I felt like the concept is lacking of details (and I wanted something more complicated to flex my skills with). The process was quite simple, I put the original artwork in the box and I type the same elements that are in the reference such as "Tentacles", "Worn" or "Creepy". I've generated hundreds of result, but only few result/details catch my attentions, such as the different shape of the hat, the creepy tentacle as belt and some rips on the clothes.
I like to use AI to "quickly" generate ideas, instead of using google images or pinterest. I believe that AI is a really nice and powerful tool when people use it properly, I'm just disappointed of the direction is going on with now days.
Anyway only at later stage of the process (somewhere around texturing) I found out the ArtStation's link of the reference's artist.
I'm so sad because on his page he had multiple variations for that concept, and I could've been implementing those details instead of using AI to generate new ones.
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Back to the project.
I gotta be honest. It seems like it took me longer than the last one to finish it, but with data on my hand it took me half-time to finish it compared to the Kindred one. I just took longer break between one session and the other (sometimes even a whole week). Overall I'm really glad to see improvement on my skills.
But at the same time this project feel to me less "polish" than what I wanted to look like (even if friends says is an amazing result).
Still right to this moment I'm a bit ashamed to publish it just because I probably could've done a better job and this project may lower my portfolio's value... But is the end of the year and I want to wrap my portfolio with a new entry and focus on scouting new ideas for the next project.
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I've been ask to attach a work in progress video that shows the process on each phase.
I think there is too much to show, this is not a 8hr project. So I made a short clip showing multiple sessions on the same screen. All of them are records of my live streams on twitch. This can give you a glimpse about all phases of this project as you can clearly see Sculpting, Retopo, Baking and Texturing.
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I moved quite away from the base model, for this reason I wasn't able to sort out the tech side of the animation.
This mean that I wasn't able to set it up for an in-game skin... I'm sorry guys.
Unfortunately animation is something that I admire as a viewer but I don't really enjoy working on it.
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Thanks to Benjamin Gilli for this amazin concept.
You can visit his profile here: https://www.artstation.com/bgilli
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▼ wSoulless // 22 DEC 2022