The Dawning of the Sea Otter! wip

[Turchik]

Hey everybody,

I'm working on a personal project in my down time. I took a little detour from the traditional "super soldier" and I am doing some fan art based on the Sea Otters from South Park. I'm keeping most of the basic design of their armor but adding details and fleshing out forms when necessary, such as in the boots so far, and will render in a grittier style like the gun below. Gloves are just stand-ins for now. I plan on modeling the inside of the mouth, helmet and the laser eye piece as well. I started with a dynamesh for the body and modeled armor in Maya and cleaned up in Z-brush. Hair/fur clipping through the armor wont be an issue as it will be baked separately in the end. I'm trying to decide whether or not to let the fur stick out between arm armor or if I want to have an under armor. To give myself some structure I'm going to restrict myself to the Dominance war rules on polycount and texture memory. Crits, comments and suggestions are welcomed.





Reference shown is all South Park studios work.
I completed the rifle a while back. I'll dial down the dirt/grime on it a little. I plan on doing a small environment for the final piece.



Heres the episodes if anyone interested:

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/155388/dawning-of-the-sea-otters

when is the next Dominance war supposed to start?

[Turchik]

Here's a smallish update. I have most of the hard surface pieces roughed in. I still need to do some cloth under armor on the chest, arms, and gloves. I still have the inside of the mouth to do. I'll do the laser eye piece on a separate texture sheet after everything is finished. When the low poly is made the eyes will be closer together as they were before the fur/hair. Crits and comments welcome.

[Turchik]

Added teeth and damage. I took the under armor as far as I am going to take it in ZBrush. I plan on adding in surface details to the armor, fabric, and nose/mouth in Photoshop, as I feel i get sharper results. A little more grooming to do on the fur and some painting. Working on the low-poly now. Crits and comments welcome.

[Dragon]

I grew up with the show, man, they did some nutty stuff on that show (Cartman was my favorite character, he really cracked me up). This is a very cool idea. Heck, maybe someone will see this and decide to make a movie based off what you have done?? It's all looking great.

[Turchik]

Thanks Dragon!

I fell behind where I wanted to be, with 7 days without power from the windstorm that hit the midwest, but back up and running. I have the low poly finished* and have my base normals generated. Alot of cleanup to do and some planned tweaking of geometry, but all in all baked well. I used decimation master for all pieces except for the fur. There is geometry for whiskers,not shown, and also space in the uv's to include future hair/fur patches. I plan on keeping the geometry under 15k probably closer to 14k.
For the fur I used 4 sided follicles and smoothed their face normals in maya. In ZBrush I painted the fur with a midtone base color, dark roots, and lighter tips. I plan to bake off a diffuse that will match the normals and I should be able to easily adjust the colors with hue/saturation & levels in photoshop.


Screenshots from maya high quality renderer, just normals with a blinn..

[Turchik]

I made the proportion changes to the eyes and nose and I have my textures pretty far along, but I am still open to suggestions. These are Marmoset renders with global lighting
I've been working between the southpark character/concept and real life otter reference to get something pleasing in the middle. I went with more realistic whiskers, and probably will add a couple to the eyebrows, currently they need a little color/spec tweaking. The teeth/mouth was from real ref as well.
I plan on doing a couple different colorings for both the armor and the fur, as is the case in the show, and my reference above.

Still to do:

-dial back dirt/grim a bit

- fur patches for around the belly and at appropriate/key points on the model

-rigging & posing


crits and comments welcomed!

[Turchik]

So here's where I'm stopping for now. After some professional advice I think I am going to redo the body and overall proportions to be more like that of a real otter and less like the south park ones. But here's how it looks now.

[Malveillance]

SICK !!! This episode is certainly one of the best ever !