This model is based off AJ Fosik's sculpture "Sad Demon Oath" (centre and right photos), which is well known for featuring on the album cover art for Mastodon's album, The Hunter. More of AJ Fosik's art can be found at https://www.ajfosik.com/
It's done! I decided to have a little fun and make the background a strong nod to the original album cover.
Front view. Textures are PBR based: colour, roughness, metalness. Height and normal maps both feed into the bump mapping input (of the aiStandard material).
Front view wireframes
Side view
Side view wireframes
Three quarter view
Three quarter view wireframes
Optimization was not the aim of this particular project. The model has a load of repeating parts that could be copied if I wanted to render this realtime. What I really wanted to do was make use of UDIMs and multiple UV sets to make it look good! The first five UV tiles (top row, plus the bottom left and bottom middle) are the model's main UV set. The sixth tile is a second UV set that the scale/feather meshes have only. I stacked the feather/scale shells in their first UV set, allowing finer colour, roughness and height/normal detail. I used the second UV set to layer on a random black speckle across all the scales, as well as some ambient-occlusion like shading. Both the speckle and the shading needed to be unique for each scale, but the general colour/roughness/height/normal did not need to be.
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