Elemental Spirits for Game Project

The Making of the Elemental Spirits for my game The Wandering Witch

These spirits are based around the 4 elements of Water, Fire, Earth and Air, and designed as animals.

The Water spirit being a sea serpent, Fire - a phoenix, Earth - a boar, and Air - a swarm of insects.  Below are my sketches for how I imagined them in the environment.

The first three spirits followed the same pattern of rough model in Maya, detailed model in ZBrush and textured in Substance Painter using the same method as in my environment props project. The air spirit did not need the ZBrush step but did require some animation.

First I created the Water spirit, as it was the easiest shape to model.

Below shows the wireframe for the initial Maya rough model, next to the Final ZBrush model.

As I am reasonably new to ZBrush, I didn't know a lot of the features and was just getting by with the basic knowledge I had. Because of this the poly count for these models are really high and I had trouble with the UV Unwrapping.

Below Shows the 3 stages of the design with texturing included.

Next was the Fire spirit, I had more trouble with this one as the wings were too thin from the base model so when I tried to texture them in ZBrush, the brush would affect the opposite side of the wing.  I had to thicken the wings quite a bit before I could work on them properly, wasting a bit of time in the process and leaving the wings looking too thick in the final model.

Next was the Earth boar, this was the most difficult to model since I am less familiar with the shape and  form of a boar than the previous two.  Because of this I think the form is too simple and even looks cute compared to the more intimidating look I was aiming for.

Finally the Air spirit, while modelling some insects was easy, I wanted to animate them to make up for the lack of detail and interest compared to the other 3.  

I was initially trying to follow a Youtube tutorial by SARKAMARI, called Maya VFX Series: Flock of Birds in Maya,(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWoFo588qiE&t=916s) to replicate a swarm of insects, however, along the way I kept running into different problems.  I simplified my plan and tried exporting it to Unity, however, could not for the life of me find a helpful explanation of how to export VFX (particle systems) out of Maya.

Because of this I ultimately had to start over with a simple model and animation for the different bugs, then do the rest of the work in Unity.

Below are the models and textures in Maya.

This video shows what I had in Maya following the tutorial however, as stated before, I ran into a wall when it came to getting this into Unity.

Next I animated the three different bugs using very basic keyframe animation. 

This was my first time animating and I am grateful it wasn't anything more involved.  After this I took them into Unity to make the swarm.

This is the final look in Unity, I duplicated  them to make a general shape, then grouped them into three sections that would rise out of the ground separately to add more interest.