Legionut

Originally born to test the Alembic Grooming on UE4, as soon as UE5 Early Access came out I knew I had to try it.  This was my first project using XGen, and I learned this: groom before you rig, or converting Xgen Collections to Interactive Xgen Collections (required for Alembic Caching) is gonna cause problems. Also, for a correct binding, import the model with the correct rotations, don't try to fix them in Unreal.

Softwares:

Autodesk Maya (Hard Surface Modelling, UV, Rigging, Animating, Grooming in Xgen)
Substance Painter (Texturing metal)
Zbrush (creating the glue to attach each bolt and zremeshing it)
Unreal Engine 4 and 5 (game engine for the scene, materials for background objects and rust)
Adobe Photoshop (to create the noise map I used in UE5)

The material I created in UE5 creates unique patterns, lerping the metallic texture made in Substance Painter with the rust texture included in UE5. I pushed my new RTX card to the limit, using Raytracing and a lot of Post Processing.

Renders in Iray (Substance Painter) with the "raw" texture

UVs, made in Autodesk Maya

Process View: Substance Painter / ZBrush (which I used to create the glue to attach the bolts, zremeshing it) / Maya (with Rig, which I then referenced in another Maya file to create the animation)

Other images: Early test in UE4, Groom in XGen, Model from which I took inspiration (don't know the artist, but googling I found out similar statues coming from Broadway), Noise Map