The Sea Priest ( UE4 Environment )
This scene got inspired from Japanese folklore - specifically tales of Umibōzu (海坊主, "sea priest") - i giant sea-spirit that appears to sailors in open sea, dwarfing their fishing boats and trading ships. As i was gathering references, i discovered about the unique cormorant fishing practices that live to this day in Japan, so my sailors got the proper attire, koshi -mino (straw kilts) and all that .
As a bonus task for myself , since i had to rig & skin my cormorant model anyway in order to make several different postures, I decided that it would be a total waste if i don't ( poorly) animate that bird dancing to a modern beat ;)
the absolute amazing
Procedural hatching and manga shaders for EEVEE in Blender by Kristof Dedene helped me a lot to try and create manga-looking spin of the whole scene
the boat uses painted and more simple textured version for placing different-looking boats in the distance
I suspected that the sailors wont be visible from up close so i didnt really spend a lot of time trying to make them realistic
i made just one seaweed patch from Fibermesh in Zbrush and made it into projectable decal in Unreal
i rendered some alpha elements straight in Zbrush by using modified Fibermesh presets ( to resemble the straw the sailors use to protect them while out in the open sea )
this is the weird dancing thing :D some very crucial joint positions got messed up exporting from Maya to UE4 , so that why the head looks so sunken and weird
the cormorant with added feathers in Painter.For the majority of the feather placement, i used the Ornatrix Maya plugin
the Umibōzu creature - i went for something that looks like blue whale skin, adding some wrinkled skin using the new cloth sim brushes in ZBrush
since the cormorant was meant to be covered in feathers, i didn't spend a lot of time detailing the base mesh,
The weirdly shaped sea cliffs came from 3d scans i made of some really interesting small rocks in the nearby park.
