It's Never Too Late To Grow Into Yourself

Judge’s Favourite - Grads In Games Airship Game Jam. Featured by Epic Games (https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/news/show-your-pride-with-epic-games-in-rainbow-royale-2022) and Sketchfab Artist Spotlight (https://sketchfab.com/blogs/community/art-spotlight-its-never-too-late-to-grow-into-yourself/)

This is my submission for the Airship games art jam, June 2022. The theme is ‘Growth’, so I went in a bit of a different direction to most, and a direction that’s closer to home.

I’m hoping I’ve done the emotion justice here. I wanted to try and capture a sense of gentleness, of a single moment of growth that is simultaneously ground-breaking but also fragile and vulnerable - the eggshell softly cracking.

Modelled and sculpted in Blender, textured in Substance Painter (using SoMuchMaterials) and Photoshop.

I was directly inspired by Miki Bencz’ incredible techniques for creating 3D paintings - there’s a fantastic tutorial here: https://80.lv/articles/2d-sketch-in-3d-painting-techniques/ and his sketchfab is here: https://sketchfab.com/cordero

The main sculpt comes in at around 22k tris, all hand-retopologised, but using Bencz’ techniques involves duplicating the base sculpt a few times - hence the high tri count!