3:36 PM
This was a solo project I challenged myself to create during spring break. Softwares used: Blender, zBrush, Substance Painter.
It was featured in the curated 2024 Viz-A-GoGo show.
Because of the gelatinous nature of my character I knew in order to sell his sliminess I needed to find a creative way to automate the gushing and sloshing of the skin with rigging.
He represents the pinnacle of dehydration, and one might think that that would be something dry, but when you’re dehydrated you really feel more slimy and like your lymph nodes are full of sludge. So I decided to add small rig chains in all of the floppy areas that were hooked up to a simple curve that had a softbody simulation applied to it. This allowed me to just bake all of the dynamics at the end of regular animation and have this wonderful result. I could even see it working in near real-time by just playing the timeline although sometimes it would bug out.
This was my first exposure to zBrush for a serious project, as I had only sculpted in Blender before. The skills eneded up being pretty transferrable and I was able to get this result. I make a much lower poly retopologized version, and then baked the normals onto it. Some of the sculpted detail ended up being lost due to my surfaced normals muddling a bit of it.
