A few months ago I decided to remake an old creature/character that I had made back in 2016, for a few reasons:
- I wanted to see how much progress I've made over the past 6-7 years
- I wanted to experiment with taking sculpts straight from ZBrush into Marmoset Toolbag; while it's always great to see a character that's gone all the way from Sculpt through Retopology, Texturing, and Rigging, at the end of the day doing all of those steps takes up a lot of time and energy (especially when it's for a personal piece being done on your own time). And sometimes, you just want to make a cool-looking character, then move on to the next one.
- I have my particular characters and ideas that I would one day like to make into something, whether it be games, animations, or something else; so naturally, I want to update, improve and refine them over time.
First: the original Creature Sheet and Model from 2016:
This is back from a time where my 2D skills were definitely much rougher, I was just starting (well, more like "Trying") to use ZBrush, I knew far less about Retopology, and all of my texturing was done in Photoshop, because I had never heard of Substance Painter.
(Believe it or not, this was Senior Year of University in my degree for Game Art and Animation - the curriculum was still fairly new, so the coursework focused almost entirely on Maya and Photoshop, with a very brief unit in ZBrush. Today, they now have classes devoted entirely to ZBrush, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, Unity, Unreal, so it definitely became more in-line with what's actually industry standard these days.)
The overall design idea was to create an interpretation of the Jabberwocky from both the poem and its representations in films and games, but also blending in some inspiration from the Jersey Devil. (Horns, Legs with Hooves, a Forked/Pointed Tail)
And here, we have the updated 2023 model:
The core elements of the design were preserved:
- The Leech/Lamprey-like appendages emerging from the mouth
- Tattered Membrane Wings
- Sharp, Jagged Antlers
- Quad-Jointed Arms (Shoulder, 2 Elbow-like Joints, and a Wrist)
- Similar design for the Claws, Teeth, Mouth, Eyes, etc.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with the updated design - and it confirmed that the 2-3 years of tutorials and portfolio practice and past 4 years as a professional 3D Generalist have definitely helped me improve and grow as an artist. (I would still love to get any feedback or critique, though!)
