Mutant Puncher

Personal project: Mutant Puncher.

I've been working on this for several months now during my free time out of my 9 to 5 job.
As on previous project, I'm sticking to albedo/diffuse only map with hand painted texture because this is what I'm looking for to work with in the future.
Concept aside, this project was entirely made by me: Sculpt (in Zbrush), Retopology (in Blender with Retopoflow addon), UV (in Blender and 3D Coat), Baking (first attempt with Substance Painter but I ends up using Marmoset Toolbag, it's "hand down" the best baking program), Texture (in 3D Coat and Photoshop), Rendering (in Marmoset and arranged/design in Photoshop, I've used After Effect for the clip).

The texture is fully hand painted with no projection from concept (I did want to flex my hand painted skill from the ground instead of just projecting texture already made from someone else). In the first few weeks I ends up having an handpainted base with too many details, all the metal details were rusty/spoil/dirty and the same for the leather details or the jacket. I ends up removing most of the handpainted details in order to leave the model a bit more clean and relaxing(?) to stare at.

More in-depth with the details about the texturing:
I've used 2/3 different techiniques on this project.
For the kid I used a mix of "Eyedropping from concept" and "Custom color mixing".
For the piggy I used the "Greytone value to color layer" techinique.
I had a lot of fun with all of them but I'm the most comfortable with manual color mixing with a base of eyedropping.
I've recorded most of the process from A to Z as I'm an artist streamer (on twitch.tv/wsoulless), I'll probably make some quick video that shows all the handmade process.

The hardest part of this project was more psychological than technical. As mention before, I work on this during my free time and after a couple of month on it I ends up thinking "Is it still worth finishing it? Should I just stop and start a new one?". At some point another senior 3D artist post a model of his own based from the same concept (that was an hard it). Hiw model was more PBR oriented so I knew for a fact that my project was still worth finishing and publishing (mine is hand painted, he did work with PBR texture instead... and mine is high to low poly game ready model, so I was a big step forward compare to it).
At the end of the day, I'm really glad I manage to complete this with no interruptions. I had the opportunity to challenge myself on finding solutions to any problem that bash in my face (trust me, at some point I was speaking with the 3D Coat dev team for several bug I get into, problem that would've been fixed on next patch) and learning A LOT more compared to what I learn with my previous project and now I can finally say that I'm really confident on working with any concept from start to finish.

▼ wSoulless // 17 AUG 2022
e: wsoulless@outlook.com

A big THANK YOU ♥ to Tooth Wu for his incredible concepts.
Concept reference: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lxl6EV
Concept artist "Tooth Wu" (Linkedin): https://www.linkedin.com/in/toothwu/