A Steampunk Mech
This is a college project that I'm working on - its a steampunk Mecha During the research stage, I was intrigued by steampunk and horror themed mechas. I was deeply researching into H R Giger's work for another portfolio piece and was influenced by it. His work on the Alien movies and other bio-mechanical artworks create a sense of disturbing adoration within in for the genre. I have a similar sense of adoration when going through Kentaro Miura's Berserk. But, as I was already working on something in this genre, I decided to go with Steampunk Mecha.
Bio-Shock and Dishonored franchises are the most memorable steampunk games. Naturally, that's where I began to collect references from. Although great, they seemed rather simple.
Block out with animated Range of Motion
Modelling & Design
I pictured this mech be steampunk and set in a Mad Max-ish post apocalyptic world. Designed with a very old parts at hand, this mech is heavy and moves slowly. The model has been made with traditional subdivision modelling method in Blender. Some parts with dents were sculpted in Zbrush. I made some design alterations to the arms, legs and weapons of the mech, this was done to reflect upon my own design concept for the movements this mech can have. There over a fifty individual parts on the mech along with some decal elements. I made some decisions with regards to the mech's motion quite early on, with regards to wires on it legs, which could hinder the animation since rigging them and having them animate properly would've been an issue for me.
Rigging
Rigging (I'm not great with it) the mech was quite an experience, especially when it came to rigging the chain from its groin area. I had managed to rig the arms and legs using inverse kinematics and it worked perfectly fine. The chain also seemed fine with inverse kinematics but I was unable to counter the chain's z rotation while animating. Eventually I rigged the chain with FK.
Animation
Animating the mech to create a cinematic was a fun experience. Its been a while since I animated anything and got to relearn some of the basics after initially messing up with the animation principles.
Unwrapping and Texturing
The objects individually unwrapped. And also maintained a close to uniform Texel density. I assigned materials and divided the mesh into groups based on the parts (legs, arms, body). The texturing was done in Substance Painter, with the help of baked texture maps from Marmoset Toolbag. I prefer Toolbag over Substance Painter to bake my textures as toolbag provides more control. A total of 6 materials were assigned to this mech.
Unreal Engine
In Unreal, I used quixel megascan assets to populate the environment with rocks grass and hills.
Beauty Renders
