XENOPHAGE

I don't get to make game art very often these days (I'm a 3d arts lecturer), but it felt so good to dust off the digital clay and dive back into the pipeline! Meet the Xenophage (Pedro) - my latest little bundle of joy. I wanted to see how far I could push a highly optimised, production-ready asset while channelling some classic dark sci-fi and body-horror vibes (obvious alien influence 😅)
He doesn’t bite... much.
Technical Breakdown: 
Polycount: 44k Triangles 
Textures: 1 x 4k Texture Set (PBR Workflow) 
Sculpt & Retopo: Sculpted in ZBrush and Blender (hoping back and forth with GoB, it's a really nice workflow), manual retopology handled completely using RetopoFlow to ensure super clean edge loops ready for deformation and animation. 
Textures & LookDev: Textured in Substance Painter and rendered out in Marmoset Toolbag. I had a blast tuning the subsurface scattering (SSS) on that big, juicy head dome 
It turns out the muscle memory never really leaves you! Which is nice to know. I have a fear of getting rusty now that I teach. Let me know what you think of the wireframes and the UV packing efficiency in the slides below.