Fire Officer

Full Technical breakdown here:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/GvBabB
The fire officer was a nice challenge! The modeling and texturing were completed in record time for me, and then I spent a full week enhancing the presentation! The character is fully mirrored (except for the face, chest, and skirt) with appropriate rectangular UVs, so I was able to fit all assets in two 2k textures. When texturing, I played with the roughness and metal maps by hand-drawing highlights where needed. I usually render in Blender with Cycles. However, for this project, I decided to open up Unreal and create Custom VFX! I hand-painted my own maps in Krita and created the Flame, Flame Fly-aways, Smoke, and Eye VFX with their materials. For the lightning and sparks VFX I utilized Niagara and hand-drawn maps with a sprite renderer. Exploring VFX in Unreal was extremely fun, I want to do more projects that include it! The biggest challenge for VFX was to stay true to the style and not get tunnel-visioned on the details.
The "drawings" were created in Blender with the grease pencil, and the shake was done with its material in Unreal.
Additionally, I rigged and animated the character in Blender. The eye has custom blend shapes that I animated inside of Unreal.
I will be creating a separate post for the visual breakdown of this character. Stay tuned!

Concept art:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xD0Dwr