Saturday, February 19, 2022

Full Body Hork Bajir 2.0









Full Body Hork Bajir 2.0 Development

During my recent plane rides I had been sketching new ideas for a full body Hork Bajir sculpt. Trying to design something that would match my choice of design aesthetics with a more traditional understanding of the descriptions from the Animorphs books series.
I began with a few pencil sketches:





After which I came home scanned the sketches, cleaned up the ones I liked and then added them to the body sketch to get a feeling of how they flowed with the overall forms:

After this point I blocked out the model using primitives in zbrush

Once I felt good about the blockout I merged everything together, remeshed it for subdivs and the sculpted the forms and finally added the scales via a custom set of VDM brushes I developed for this project. I also created a female variant with custom upper beak and horns.



After this I retopoed and generated uv's inside the whole thing in 3ds max. The model is around 42k tris. I wanted to make an asset that fully utilized UDIMs to make sure I would get maximum resolution across the whole character. 
In total there are 8 sheets - 4 for the body (head, torso, arms, legs) 2 for the Horns (Upper horns on the bust for matching texel density with the Head, and Lower to match the texel density of the body) and then 2 for the Eyes( Inner eye and Cornea). I may add another for an Eye overlay for AO and liquid buildup along the lower lid.

Bakes were done in Marmoset 4 at 4k for each.


I explored color variations and patterns in Substance painter and then proceeded to texture the character with an amalgamation of the various sketches. 

I then exported the result. I rendered it in Marm 3



I also Rendered the Whole thing out in Marmoset 4 in a space that is lit purely by GI and was quite pleased with the result!


Moving forward I will rig and animate the character and likely add some gear for it as well.