Sea of Thieves - 'Merry' Merrick

A game ready fan art piece of Merrick from Sea of Thieves. For this revisit of one of my older models my main focus was to push the final presentation, taking a lot of inspiration from the amazing pieces published by the Artists who worked on the game.

The idea behind the design change for the character starts with the initial brief that was created for this project. The character began in the games release and was later removed. After a short period of he was reintroduced and had undergone a dramatic design changes. The intention behind my design was to act as the transition between the two and to show what Merrick would of looked like whilst out of the game.

Also, working to improve other things such as; colour, texture maps, shaders and lighting/composition. All to better match the look and feel of the Video game.

Steps & Software:
- Sculpt in Zbrush
- Retopology in 3DCoat
- Unwrapping and UVs inside 3DS Max
- Textures and Bakes inside Substance Painter
- Sand floor asset created inside 3DS Max
- Material for the Sand created inside of Substance Designer
- Slight Displacement added to the sand, utilising a Height map, inside of Unreal to give more dimension
- Rendering inside Unreal Engine 4 and Arnold
- Post Processing inside Photoshop

UVs
- 4k Skin
- 4k Clothing
- 4k Accessories

Some additional content that was used:
- Epic Games eye and skin shader
Both tweaked to match the style of Sea of Thieves

Main inspiration for presentation style:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rAQEKm
Looking to try and match how the character models from Sea of Thieves have been presented.