Made a cloud based mesh with insert spheres in zbrush, then took a library of tilling fractal shapes and patterns I've been working on in zbrush and Photoshop and rendered them tilled over the sphere shapes in Marmoset 3
Love the creatures! One tiny crit I have is the UE4 render's might want to use a bit more love in the materials and perhaps the roughness channel. It could just be a matter of preference/style since it looks like you have a nice diffuse texture thing going, though I couldn't help but notice all of the UE4 renders have a very dry diffuse look to them (looks like a 0.5 roughness throughout), and it might be fun to play around with the roughness map to maybe introduce a bit more contrast in it in regards to looking more wet in aquatic/insect aliens while having some drier parts. You might have to tweak the level of AO that seems to be baked into the diffuse as well though in order to make it not look too strange if you introduce a more physically-based rendering technique.
Maybe even throw in a little fresnel (or not), subsurface scattering, translucency, or even have bits using the emissive texture slot, they are aliens after all! Crazy pulsating material for translucent squid space aliens using the cosine node plugged into a lerp or panner node? Heck plug it into a displacement map and you could have boils that darken and shrink vs expanding and glowing, animation not required!
All that aside, I also am a fan of how you're handling the renderings in this lovely soft diffuse manner. Thought you might want to experiment a bit more with regards to how you handle the materials in UE4 is all
Thanks for the feed back! Yeah I need to work more on tuning up my rough values, I've gotten many similar bits of feedback on how my style tends to go more towards a dry pastel diffuse look. Might be that I have an irrational fear of high gloss values and the "dunked in oil" look haha. But just taking the time for fine tuning should fix that irrational fear. I'll have to show some of the movement tech I know too to show how to represent alien life in an animated manner.
Bear Study! Update: So got a bear lover to take a look and give some feedback, she had some good notes and looks like I jumped the gun on this bear. I was so obsessed with getting the fur material right I overlooked that the proportions are all out of wack, as well the fur has covered so much of the anatomy it looks more like a teddy bear than a real bear. Lastly if this was a grizzly bear it would not sit on a log like that. She is great haha, might re work the wolf I did too with her help. So right now this bear is far from done.
Creature sculpts are wild and inspiring! Your process on the wildlife studies is interesting- are you layering multiple meshes to simulate layers of fur?
Love your work man! Especially the colors and lighting in the blue and purple aliens, would love to have them in a nice print and in a frame on the wall! Do you have any tutorials or talks? Keep it up!!
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Maybe even throw in a little fresnel (or not), subsurface scattering, translucency, or even have bits using the emissive texture slot, they are aliens after all! Crazy pulsating material for translucent squid space aliens using the cosine node plugged into a lerp or panner node? Heck plug it into a displacement map and you could have boils that darken and shrink vs expanding and glowing, animation not required!
All that aside, I also am a fan of how you're handling the renderings in this lovely soft diffuse manner. Thought you might want to experiment a bit more with regards to how you handle the materials in UE4 is all
Update: So got a bear lover to take a look and give some feedback, she had some good notes and looks like I jumped the gun on this bear. I was so obsessed with getting the fur material right I overlooked that the proportions are all out of wack, as well the fur has covered so much of the anatomy it looks more like a teddy bear than a real bear. Lastly if this was a grizzly bear it would not sit on a log like that. She is great haha, might re work the wolf I did too with her help. So right now this bear is far from done.
Creature sculpts are wild and inspiring! Your process on the wildlife studies is interesting- are you layering multiple meshes to simulate layers of fur?
Keep it up!!
that foxxey just made my night