Mortarmer, Turtle Mech

When Mortarmer’s forest home faces the threat of a volatile Mutagen, it’s up to him and his technological prowess to fight it back by turning his shell into a powerful mech suit!
But at what point does he become more machine than turtle?
Mortarmer is an original character of mine, and I did the design, modeling, texturing, rigging, and animation.

Mortarmer went through a few design changes. His arms were a little too short to manipulate his weapons as I had originally intended. The current design solves this problem and better gives the feeling of controlling a mech suit.

I set up the aiming controls for the guns so that his twin control sticks move along with the guns. Also, IK is setup for the guns, and their rotations are locked to only one axis since the joints are both hinges. A controller sits on each elbow hinge which allows for the rotation of the gun barrels.

He currently has three animation cycles: idle, walk, and run.

I used Substance Painter for all 6 of the textures. For the turtle skin, I used several procedural layers, and I painted the scales and their height map. I also painted the black splotches on the plastron and the heigh maps for the carapace.