Oniku Kuitaiiii's "BACK" - Illustration to 3D Fan Art

Oniku Kuitaiiii's "Back" illustration transformed into 3D - Fall of 2022

This is a practice piece I challenged myself to do as part of an onboarding process/exercise for a previous project. I was given a week to demonstrate my own interpretation of a 2D illustrative work and transforming it into my own style as a 3D model. The illustration used as the primary reference was "BACK" by Oniku Kuitaiiii (おにく) @oniku.kuitaiiii on instagram.

Original Illustration:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CUfCV3tBLfl/?hl=en

Given the time constraints I had to utilize several tools to get the work done. Character model is mainly a modified CC4 base avatar which I made several edits to the body and face morphs, light shape sculpting in XBrush, then on into Maya for additional mesh parts and hair add-ons. In Maya hand modeled exo and endo skeletal parts were created as well as X-Gen for the hair. Lastly all the assets were carried back over into unreal for the creation of some procedural shaders, most notable being the vertex face weighted edge detection shader with allowed for some world aligned grunge and wear and tear sans UVing of any kind. Substance Painter used for most of the actual texture sets where used. Small edits were made to the body and skin shader.

The interior circuitry is actually UVed space featuring a parallax depth offset mapping to add more depth with a panner to emulate an undulation in the light flickering. Lastly the armor has a fresnel based iridescent coat to give it that sense of Mecha vibes/vapor ware from the early 90s e.g. works from Masamune Shirow etc. (Apple Seed, Intron Depot, Ghost in the Shell...)

The background art is just some old UE4 asset pack from Epic Games free collection called "Scifi Hallway" on the Unreal Marketplace
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/scifi-hallway