Whilst I was looking for something challenging to do as my next personal piece, I came across this work done by artist Matt Dixon. As soon as I saw it, I knew this was going to be my next challenge, so I've commited myself to it over the past few weeks and have slowly been grinding away in my spare time (original piece is below - I do not own any rights to the image below).
As this is 2D art being transferred into a 3D format, I realised that there were a lot of things here that worked for the illustration but wouldn't work in 3D, so I've had to take some creative license whilst modelling the robot to make sure things look functional; check out it out below
Moving into the texturing phase, I've been hearing so many positive things about Substance Painter so I thought I'd give it a try. It's quite similar to Photoshop in some senses so was quite easy to get the hang of, and was a fun process. After that, it was back to Maya to create a rig then begin lighting & rendering.
On to the final stretch! Now that the rigging's done, I just had to create the final pieces to tie everything together. I created the worm and grass using XGen in Maya, which seemed daunting at first as I've never done any kind of hair/fur creation before, but I got there in the end. Once all of that was finished, it was onto lighting & rendering. That was probably my biggest challenge during this whole process, I'd never used Arnold as a render engine before so trying to understand the render settings compared to other render engines I've used previously was quite the task, but once I got my head around it all was well. Last thing to do was a little bit of post in Photoshop, then we came out with this as the final image!
(I've also uploaded some turns as well (: )