RK-9 Pitbull Unit

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Game-ready Pitbull-mech asset made for the ArtStation Neo-Tokyo challenge. I felt like I made a big stride in my work during this piece. Grateful for the outstanding concept art from JPax. I took a different approach to making this piece than I usually do. I really wanted to push the stylized look so I built it with that in mind from the get-go. Typically my work has been focused on hyper-realism but I quite enjoyed this process and want to show more of this style in my portfolio.

I started first by making the mounted turret which is around 30k tris, I then worked on the paneling for the head and the rear of the mech. The orthographic shots provided by the concept artist helped immensely and I was able to bring them into Maya as image planes for a great blockout. While I was further developing the model, I made a note to myself that I wanted it to be a denser mesh. While the other works I make show my ability to optimize meshes I wanted to show what I could do with a bigger poly budget. I used most of my detail on the legs and plating of the body. I wanted to show it had been carefully manufactured.

The body came out to about 67k tris so I finished at just under 100k with the turret.

This was also the first asset that I've ever done handpainted textures for and I felt very rewarded at the end with the time I put into them.

I took heavy inspiration from the art of Overwatch especially with their new content featuring robots and mechs from Null Sector. It was super helpful for overall feel and lookdev.

A few things changed from the concept- I followed the alignment of the orthos and he ended up being a little taller than he looks in the final concept render which i don't hate. To couple with that I gave him glowing eyes that peer from under his hooded plating. He definitely a little "cuter" than the concept. For one of the final images I rigged him and posed him in a hunched-over look.

The biggest challenge with this piece was definitely time. Putting in 60 hours to a personal piece while being a full time student is tough. Doing it in 2 weeks is brutal. Nonetheless it got finished and hopefully my personal work won't be under time constraint at least for a while.

Special thanks to Florian Neumann for his workflow breakdowns and Chase Markham for feedback.

Concept Artist Jpax: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/49er18

https://www.artstation.com/chasemarkham

https://www.artstation.com/florianneumann