Lantern rabbit

The lantern rabbit was just a fun little project I though about trying out for the contest. He was suppose to be a lost robot with a pet plant on his back. 

I started off by concepting a few ideas and came up with a basic design I liked. I wanted a few different materials in this one to contrast with the metal. 

I kept to sculpting in Maya as I felt most comfortable in this for the time limit on this competition, and modeled half of it to stack the UVs. However some UV's such as the body, outer leg shells and head I kept separate to avoid the mirroring effect. 

I usually use SB Painter to hand paint a lot of models. Normally I would make a HP model in Zbrush, but I wanted to try a workflow of using Painter to bake in normals and then rebaking them back in later for the high poly. While this did work and I found the workflow less destructive, it does mess around with some of the generators such as curvature and I found myself using a lot more anchor points than I normally would in creating the textures. Overall I was happy with the outcome of the Painter textures. Some of the materials I had tried to create in Substance sampler, such as a brass metal which I used as a base. 
I tried to have wear in the locations it made sense such as the shoulder .

I wanted to try out SB Stager as this was part of the Adobe package. As positives, I really enjoyed how easy the workflow was between Sampler, Painter and Stager was,  and the quality never really dropped. Stager is also a fairly easy to use and renders pretty fast, and the 'Match image' function works relatively well, certainly in lighting terms.. I also really enjoyed the 80's horror theme set up, a really nice set of lights. In negatives, I found the imported lights often didn't work so the lights in the ears and staff never showed up. I feel this maybe due to a scale issue. The Camera renders when using 'Match Image'  also often jumped a little from their viewport render, so some of the renders come out with the character floating.  Overall I think its a nice package and something I will try using again, particularly for 'Prop shots'.

Floating issue found despite camera resets

Really nice lighting variations and match image lighting

A quick mock up of an equivalent version in UE5