Bug City

I was inspired to make this after seeing concept art from the movie Mortal Engines.

The bug was sculpted in Zbrush, the trim sheet for the city was then made in Maya. Everything was baked and textured in Substance Painter, then the scene was constructed and rendered in Marmoset Toolbag.

My biggest challenge here was definitly coming up with a design I was pleased with. I went through many variations of "city on a creature" until I found one I was happy with. Even then, while I was part way through modeling and laying stuff out I found myself taking screenshots and bringing them back into photoshop to draw over and refine the design. 

Another issue I ran into was making all the mechanical parts inside the bugs legs actually texturable. I Initially put them together with IMM brushes in Zbrush however the models that those brushes contained were not able to be unwrapped easily. Eventually I settled on just making a sort of sleeve for them and shrink-wrapping that around the mechanical parts in Maya. Once I had this it was simple enough to UV and bake down normals from the high poly mechanical parts to the low poly sleeve.

Once I finally got everything figured out I feel like this project really came together. To this day it is one of my favorite things I made in my years at Digipen.