Scouting Uruk-Hai, photoreal personal project

Soundtrack strongly recommended ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfWdhxonUPo

Hello! I have had this idea about creating the photoreal uruk hai for a while now, as well as creating a bigger personal project that will sum up everything i have learned about high-end CGI assets creation. This got relatively hard, as project was time consuming and spread in time, by the end of it i saw i could do many things better but felt like it's time to wrap this one up.

Texturing and lookdev was the main focus here - wanted to tackle some highly detailed creature skin shading, as well as more complex materials, like suede, leathers, worn metals. Additionally, during the project, it occurred that there are so many different leathers, coming from different sources here, that it was also great training to creating interesting composition, and nice surface separation when there are a lot of similar materials - in terms of modelling as well as surfacing.

Original idea for this character was to be Lurtz, but in the end I didn't spend too much time on getting highly accurate likeness, its more of a base, took some ideas from different uruk-hai portrayed in Peter Jackson's trilogy.

The project was created entirely in ACES workflow - from textures, through lights to rendering space - this was another subject that i wanted to learn more myself at home, not on studio's ready-made pipeline, to understand it more deeply.

Model was done from scratch in Zbrush, no scans or base meshes were used. clothes were created either in marvelous designer or with poly modeling in maya, depending on needs, then improved in Zbrush. Textures were created primarily in Substance Painter. The final scene was wrapped up, lit and rendered in Maya Arnold. I didnt do any comp here, just a slight global adjustments in brighness, contrasts. Wanted to present raw renders and achieve as much as possible in shading/lighting instead of post. Turntables were wrapped up in after effects.

For the presentations sake i made 4 different scenes, studio and 4 different HDRIs to test the shaders in different lighting conditions.

Overall it was a great venture into the Tolkien and Jackson's worlds, which i find one of the best fantasy worlds created ever. It was a great experience to look for hours through the related scenes over and over, admiring the beauty and perfection of it, as well as, going frame by frame, finding funny goofs. Ocassionaly ended up pausing the project and rewatching the trilogy again :D.

Hope you enjoy it as much as i did ;)