'Can I join you guys???'
'Ummm...sorry... there doesn't appear to be mush room over here' :D

Painful puns aside, this was a fun little project to put together. I had been considering developing an alien bestiary/botany world building thing for some time now, and this is a little step in that direction. I've gotten into the habit of quickly sketching 10-15 thumbnail sketches on an A3 and then picking one to further develop into a more 'game-ready' / production level scene, which could be used in either a cinematic or as a proper gameplay scenario.

Furthermore, I'm testing pipelines to see what the fastest way to get to that point would be for a one-person team. The goal here was to create a new organic design, flesh it out in a good-enough scene, and get a decent enough physical product as a 3d print as well. I'm still amazed that we now live in a time where this actually feasible to pull off without a huge investment!

Brief overview of process :

- Sculpted two hi-poly versions of the main organism (kept it at around 3mil polys)
- Remeshed (using Zremesher) and exported high and low poly objs (around 15k polys)
- Imported and baked normals in the new version of Substance Painter - tried the automatic UVs as well - which worked well enough!
- Textured both variants using a mixture of some hand-painting and smart materials - kept it pretty simple as I'm not a particularly proficient texture artist
- Set up the scene in Twinmotion with props from Quixel Megascans - TM2020 is a pretty decent upgrade in terms of light quality - I added some detail lights here and there trying to mimic how I would light a scene on location for a narrative short/movie
- Exported two scenes and did a bit of post in photoshop (primarily dodging/burning + filter work from Nik's software)
- Made a variant of one of the mushrooms for 3d printing where I decimated the mesh and added a base with a few megascans rocks on it for interest
- Sliced in Cura and printed in cheap PLA then did the typical sanding/polishing workflow

If anyone is interested I could delve into more depth in a blog post further down the line!