Hi folks!
This is my Little Mermaid version!
These are screenshots from Unreal 4.
She’s a naive and curious young creature who lives in the ocean twilight zone, a layer of water below the ocean surface, just beyond the reach of sunlight. Because of that, her skin is pale and she has big fish eyes that help her see in the dark. Her seal ears allow her to hear better underwater cause the shape of our ears are meant to capture sound waves that travel in the air better than in water and the gills on her rib cage are part of her unique respiratory system. While living in deep waters, she longs to get to know the bright and colorful world on the surface, not knowing that her fate is as gloomy as the waters in which she inhabits.
I sculpted her high poly model in Zbrush and then retopologized her in Maya. Having in mind that she would be a real time character, I tried to keep my polycount as low as possible for optimization purposes and was careful to place edge loops around areas that would suffer more deformation in an animation process, like her face and fins. I also wanted to save some polys for a hair card method that would give me a nice hairline and a natural and flowy look, ready for games. I ended up with 20.523 tris for the mermaid and 20.638 tris for the hair. Her texture set was done in Substance Painter, the rig was done in Maya and the render is a screenshot from Unreal.
Mermaid 4096x4096 texture set
Hair 4096x2048 texture set
My work in progess is here: The Little Mermaid - Sea Creature WIP
And this is my portfolio: https://luizasg29.wixsite.com/luizagomes3d
Although this was not my first game character, it was my very first time in a challenge like this. To me it was especially tricky to manage time cause I tend to be very perfectionist and picky with a lot of details and sometimes this keeps me from moving on., but here I am! haha I loved the challenge and it was amazing to see so many awesome and creative works!
Good luck to everyone!