Aracnaeus is a project that started in Jared Krichevsky's Creature Sculpting class at Gnomon. With some help from Paul Gaboury in Advanced Digital Sculpting class I was able to give the concept some extra life and take it into Unreal Engine. All the texturing was done the same as the previous characters.
The environment was kitbashed with megascans and I was able to create some simple niagara systems to give the ambiance.
THE INSPIRATION
This project worked a little differently. I was tasked in Creature Modeling and Sculpting to do a few prompts over the 10 week course. The third and last prompt was horror which led to the project I have here. Below I have the main project, but as a bonus I have included the original which was a render that I produced out of zbrush using keyshot passes and comped in nuke.
Modeling & Sculpting
With Aracnaeus, the journey was long and arduous. Without it as a case example I would not know how to optimize sculpts sketched in ZBrush. Big thank you to Paul Gaboury for helping me understand how tesimation can really benefit me as an artist!
Bad Bad Topo!
Below is what I ended up with at the end of week 10 in Creature Modeling and Sculpting. One thing that keyshot is extremely good at is taking what one has in ZBrush and rendering it. Not bad right? Well if you want to do anything with it one must retopologize it. What was I to do?
Geo Fixes
As I mentioned, Aracnaeus went through some transformations. It started as a ZBrush concept sketch. After some help I was able to even out the mesh using the tessimate feature to average out the verticies enough to get a clean remesh process. Once I was able to re-mesh it properly I then projected the detail back on using the Project history and a timeline marker. Zbrush is an amazing tool and has many hidden treasures in the UI!
Textures?
When I had some decent topology I then used the uv master in ZBrush to get me some kinda ok uvs. I then used Substance Painter to bake high poly onto lower poly geo. Using the polypaint as a base I built the texture up and exported basecolor, normal and the standard RMA pack method (Roughness, Metalness, AO) and a SES pack for the Specular, Emissive and Scatter maps. By creating an alpha I was able to pack the Emmisive channel in Photoshop which allowed for the emmissive green glow to become exposed in engine.
Bonus: First Iteration
As mentioned I thought it would be neat to see how this project progressed as my knowledge base increased. Below are the renders of my final for Jared Krichevsky's Creature Modeling and Sculpting course.
