King Kaw

King Kaw is a creature asset I made based on an 8 bit character from a Pokemon parody game demo I worked on. It is a species of parrot that adapted to flightless life using its wings reformed as forearms as legs, and its feet as hands.
I used ZBrush, Topogun, Painter, and Marmoset in the process of making King Kaw. I'm particularly happy with the beak and toe textures and the skin texture around the face which I built in Designer. If I were to start again I would do the feathers as cards rather than try to rely on my bake. I created alphas which I used in the zbrush sculpting and painter texturing, but the map couldn't quite capture the fidelity of the feathers I had sculpted in, which you can see in the zbrush render. I tried some curvature mapping and normal tricks to get a sense of the refractive nature of the feathers, which got an interesting look in Painter but didn't translate as well in other viewers.