Organic Sculpt Process
My process started by finding multiple references of cicadas and turning those references into a robotic fantasy bug. I began in ZBrush, where I organically sculpted similar anatomy to a cicada with my own twist. I wish, during this process, that I had sculpted the body to be more mechanical than it was. This could have potentially helped me brainstorm more efficiently earlier on, which would have been a huge time saver for the future processes.

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High Poly Process
Once I finished the sculpt, I used Zmodeler to start adding the hard surfaces for a cleaner edge flow and the mechanical feel I was aiming for. I used my pre-existing knowledge of mechanical components and created my own using simple hex/circle-shaped brushes, building them out from there. Something I wish I had done during the retopology process, however, was sketching out my ideas beforehand, as I was only working with what I could see in front of me. This significantly slowed down the high poly process because I kept fixing and adding to existing pieces. It also made the edge flow a little less clean than I would have liked.

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Low Poly Process
When I finished retopping all the hard surfaces, I began the low poly surfaces in ZBrush. Some issues I had to fix in my high poly—so my faces wouldn’t be greyed out during the bake—were holes in the mesh, which I fixed by dropping down multiple subdivisions and using the Move tool. For the wings, I made them extremely low poly and later used an opacity map to fix the artifacting. I did this to skip over a longer low poly retopology process.

 

Poly Paint Process
After the low poly was done, I added the polypaint to designated pieces that I thought would fit together as the same material when exported to Substance. Once again, I wish I had spent more time drawing out and conceptualizing my ideas beforehand to save time.

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UV Unwrap Process
When I decided everything looked good, I exported my low poly geometry to Maya, where I auto-unwrapped it and did a test bake in Substance. I quickly learned that, despite the fixes I made, there were still issues with the distance between the low poly and the high poly bake. I brushed it off for a little bit, but I realized—when I started cutting the UVs—that the geometry was already cut, despite not having cut it myself. I tried fixing the issues for hours in ZBrush, but new problems kept coming up. There was manifold geometry and duplicated faces I just couldn’t see in ZBrush, and I learned quickly that Maya is much more efficient at catching and fixing these types of problems. After fixing the issues, I started the UV unwrap process once again and completed it effectively. I just cut where the two polypaints would intersect between different components.

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Opacity Map Process
It was finally time to create the opacity map, which was self-explanatory after watching a tutorial (Credit: Isaac Oster). I brought the full color ID map and UV map of the wing from Substance and Maya into Photoshop, inverted the wing colors to black and white, and re-exported it back into Substance. This allowed me to fix the baked distortion on the wings.

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Texturing Process
Finally, I had my bake ready to be textured. I started with a base layer of aged steel and worked off of smart materials for the larger pieces and components. I used “Steel Painted Scraped” and added some alphas for an even more decayed look. For the lava effect, I used a stylized lava-cracked material, and for the hot metal plating, I used “Corrupted Damaged Metal.” I increased the tiling and experimented with multiple settings. For some components, I used “Corrupted Veins” for the lights on the wings and boxy pieces, also adjusting the settings. For the eyes, I used the same lava material but added a metal hex-shaped mask, then inverted the selection on two different layers to achieve a hexagon shape that reveals the light from the lava underneath.