MeetMat 3: Wasteland Wanderer Mittens

Welcome to my MeetMat 3 entry.  Let me introduce you to Wasteland Wanderer Mittens.

This is Mittens the cat. He lives in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian world where he travels the wasteland. Once a cuddly house cat, he had to learn to survive in the post-apocalypse.

Everything excluding the patches and the stickers are made in Substance Painter,  this includes all the displacement. The patches were made in Substance Sampler and the stickers drawn in Procreate and Photoshop. Even after the rule change that allowed adjusting the highpoly (for instance sculpting in Zbrush) I wanted this to purely be a Substance project for myself. 

The renders were made with Iray renderer in Substance Painter.

You can read more about the concept and process throughout my older updates.

Shown above are the channels , some examples of my folder & layer structure and some of the paths I've made using the new substance painter path tool.

 I learned a lot and I had a lot of fun designing Mittens and bringing him to life in Substance Painter!

I also created his glove, paw, and the platform. I also made some changes to the mask because I learned a lot during the process and wanted to make it look more cohesive.

The final steps will be to do some overall tweaks and creating the final renders.

When the pants were done I started working on the boots. I wanted him to have a little piece of scratching post material he modified to his boot so he can always scratch his nails on the go. I am imagining a world where animals can craft or buy their own tools and supplies to help them on their way through the wasteland.

This is a short update for the feedback session. Here I added the pants. I created the pants in the same way as I created the jacket.
Im now also already playing around with different background colors for the final renders.

In the process view above you can see my progress of the jacket. I've changed the texture resolution of the head to 1K so my laptop was had less trouble rendering.

I added the filter on the mask with a little easter egg it's infused with catnip.

I created the material of the helmet and designed and added a sticker to test my idea. I am going to add more stickers with typical cat things/jokes to create the vibe of a cool, punk cat.

The helmet is a WIP and I'm now figuring out what I can add like greebles, to make it more interesting.

After the fur I tweaked a lot with the displacement around the face, colors and smaller details and I'm quite happy how the face turned out so far. after this I played around with environments and made my first test renders.

Now its time for me to create a block-out  of the rest of the design and work on the bigger parts.

I then created a simple placeholder for the gas mask. Now it was time for me to figure out how to do the fur. I looked at reference of cat faces and tried out patterens with all kind of brushes. In the end I hand-painted all of the fur strokes and added layers with different colors.

Since I wasnt sure on how to create a cat face with fur, I started working on this part first. I started out with some height displacement sculpting and tried to mimic the shape of a cat's face. After this I created the eyes using displacement.

This is the start of creating the textures. I've been working on and off on on this project and decided it was time for an update.

I want to make a cat in a dystopian/scifi outfit which tells a little story. The cat has tools with him which help him live in a dystopian wasteland. I want him to look tough but I want to also show hints he once was a cuddly house cat.

Is he looking for his lost owner?