Bug Legs!
Before I could look at rendering and texturing my monster, I needed to give it legs. Overall I decided to keep mixing things up based on reference from my thumbnails, so my monster has a leg formation similar to that of thumbnail 2, even though a lot of my design is based on thumbnail 3. I sculpted this by using Zspheres, a feature where you can draw spheres and turn them into actual geometry based on the desired shape, making use of see-through in Zbrush, i made it easy to fit the legs to specification based on real reference.
This formed my basis, before I went and sculpted my details onto the leg, eventually I ended up with this for my sharkbug’s legs.
In general, I feel that my model still has that technological aspect to it, but more rustic, decayed. I’m happy its turning out this way, as I can use it to further convey that my monster is angry, due to its neglect over the years. Aside from theming, this is how my monster looks with the legs and everything connected to the main body.
I am incredibly happy with it. However, this week doesn’t end on this, I still have to texture and render it ready for paintover in Week 6. Instead of using substance painter, I made use of blenders shader nodes/ texture nodes features, that can be used to create procedural textures that fit exactly what I need to make, such as rusted metal, brass, copper, etc.
This is an example of a rusty metal procedural texture using nodes, I had researched it and found quite a concise tutorial which helped greatly, especially with understanding how nodes interact with specific results. It also allowed me to apply the rust to other materials, like on the wings. Originally the wing texture node were circuit boards, however with these nodes, I could add rust and discolouration to them, only to emphasize that point of abandonment.
Rendering!!
Now that textures were in order, I could now start the rendering process, to get ready for paintover in Week 6! I wasn’t entirely sure how I wanted to have the final image composed, so I took a few assorted shots of the sharkbug until I found one that I really liked and wanted to stick with. I also did a clean render with all the lighting, materials in my desired posed to see what it looked like.
Here is the first clean full render of my sharkbug, no additions, or anything else, just the render. I was really happy with the way the red lighting came out on the eyes, as it looks almost clockwork-like, and incredibly ominous, along with the red afterglow and the heat coming from the sharkbug’s mouth, its so hot its white.
From this point, all the work I can do is entirely paintover work, so keep an eye out in Week 6, to see how my final render looks!