The Flesh Mace

Key Responsibilities: Design, Modeling, Sculpting, Texturing, UV Mapping, Rendering, Lighting, Baking

Work in Progress Post: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lRnwNo

This was a random idea that I had one day while trying to think of unique maces in games/movies. So often maces seem to get the short end of the stick in terms of uniqueness/interesting design (not that there aren't some really neat ones out there), therefore I wanted to create my own take on the mace. The idea originally was to make it look like an alien brain wrapped in some sort of weathered, slimy leather. I think this is the grossest thing I have ever made.

The low resolution base model was created in Maya. I kept it pretty simple before moving onto ZBrush to sculpt the holes and strange shapes of the fleshy growth that makes up the striking portion of the weapon. The goal behind the sculpting was the create a sort of uncanny, Rorschach like effect with sections of the model where it seems like faces are trying to push through the flesh of the weapon. I kept that pretty subtle which has been nice seeing people notice it on their 2ed or 3ed viewing or after a few seconds of examining the piece.

Once this was completed, it was reduced from its 600,000 polygon high-res to around 15,000 using ZRemesher and Dynamesh. I later manually reduced the polycount to around 12,000. I UV'd the low-resolution model in Maya and exported it to Marmoset for baking. Thankfully, despite this being a relatively complex model, the first run of bakes worked perfectly. Texturing was done in Substance using a mix of Quixel Megascan textures that were edited to give a more alien appearance and my own texture creations. This piece is highly reliant on Subsurface Scattering to give the flesh its... unique look. I really enjoyed tweaking this and plan to do more with organic weapons in the future. This piece was rendered in Marmoset Toolbag using a 3 light setup with an additional spotlight to push the Scattering for the screenshots. Lighting played a big role in this piece, more than most others I have done. The first two screenshots are taken from nearly the same angle, but with different lighting levels. The white Scattering really allows light to make the flesh look more dynamic under different lighting conditions. Renders were compiled in Photoshop using a handful of soft lights to push bloom. Final video was edited in Premiere and utilized some text effects and transitions.