Joel Kidangan's Rookies 2022-23

Stag Beetle (Prosopocoilus Occipitalis) - All Aspects

I'd always found Stag beetles to be strange outliers within the sphere of entymology. Their need to duel other beetles is both fascinating and straight out of a fairytale. I thought this would be a good challenge to push myself when it comes to Modelling, Texturing a singular asset and then Lighting and Rendering to make it look believable within an environment.

Corpse Flower (Rafflesia Arnoldii) -  All aspects

It was a lot of fun pushing this asset. I think the colors and patterns are quite interesting and this one posed a unique challenge. 'The closer I came to accurately replicating this flower the more procedural it looked.' By the end I decided to settle on a middle ground, respecting the references while also not making it look like a procedurally generated asset. 

Azerothian Bookshop (ESMA First year Final Project) - All aspects

This was a bookshop I did for my Final project of the first year. It's inspired from the warcraft Reign of Chaos and Frozen throne games that are a fond memory for me. This was probably the biggest challenge in my first year, due to the sheer scale of the project and the amount of assets involved to make two shots.

Rig B - Responsible for Texturing, Lookdev, Lighting, Rendering.

This has easily been the most challenging piece so far in terms of texturing. I decided to explore as many materials as possible with this piece. This includes : Gunmetal, Oil hardened steel, painted steel in three layers (Metal, Primer, Rust), Greased Chrome, brushed aluminum etc. The asset itself was provided by Autodesk as part of the Rig B challenge on the Rookies. I took a lot of references from the Gypsy danger from pacific rim for this, and also kept a lot of the stock standard decals I managed to spot on the character through various screengrabs.  That being said, I did stray away from the concept after a while, to add my personal touch to the piece.  All in all this was a very challenging piece and I learnt a whole lot while attempting to texture this.

Thanks a bunch for making it all the way to the bottom. Also thanks to my teachers at ESMA as well as my classmates as without their feedback none of this would've been possible!