I wanted to try my hand at something a bit more organic in its nature so I decided to create a mimic. Most mimics you see on the internet are typically treasure chests since that tends to be the popular trope, but I wanted to branch out and do something a little different to have it stand out a little bit from the rest. My design is based off of a casket instead. The concept/design is all something that I came up with and developed over the length of the project, starting with an initial rough photobash of what I had in mind.

These screenshots feature the Mimic in 3 different angles, rendered in UE4, painted in Substance, and using two 2048 texture sheets for the materials. I started by modeling the casket in Max and then blocking out some of the other pieces to fit into it. Once I had a rough idea of the silhouette in a 3D space I take it to Zbrush to sculpt and combine pieces that I feel need to be meshed together. Once I have the hi poly from the sculpt or multi SubD levels I will make duplicates and then reduce the poly count for my pieces. A lot of the organic pieces can be tricky to reduce with out loosing too much of their detail and shape while still maintaining a decent topology. This is where I probably struggled the most, but I messed with it until I found something that I could work with. I also did some of my unwrapping with UV Master in ZBrush for mostly the organic bits since it can UV general areas pretty quickly. I took the model and UV's back into max so I could finish UVing the rest and make some minor adjustments where needed. Max was also where I used the Bend modifier to give the mimic its warped/jumpy look.

Once I had all of that figured out I took it into Substance painter. The texturing process was pretty fun this time around because I got to try some new things. I also stumbled upon some cool designs by accident when I was messing around with a few of my layers. I was limiting myself to two texture sheets to see how far I could push the realism while still not having it be too expensive. When I started the texturing I was thinking "oh man, I am not really feeling this. This isn't how I want this to look." but after a few hours of focusing the design started to really come together. I can say I am really happy with how it turned out!