Hey Everyone,
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This is a personal project that I undertook to improve and extend my skills throughout the character art pipeline . I started from a sphere in Zbrush and later on wrapped the Metahuman topology for the character, and transferred it to the metahuman pipeline using the Polyhammer plug-in in Blender. The retopology process for the rest of the project took me to Maya where I was most familiar with it's tools, as I am still learning Blender so I had to balance learning and results as much as possible.
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After a not-so-quick tackle of the UVs I used Marmoset Toolbag for the baking. For the normal maps of the character I used a combination of the tertiary details from the Zbrush highpoly along with the ones that were provided from the Metahuman creator. For texturing i used Substance painter, where I enjoyed seeing my grey models be brought to life.
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I moved to Marmoset right after for the renders since I realized that it is not able to handle volumetric effects (VDB) making it impossible to add a proper fire or a nice smoke. That gave me another opportunity to go back in Unreal engine and learn lots of extras, but i welcomed the challenge and I actually found rendering in Unreal engine to be a pleasant process.
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Thoughts and Notes

When I started this journey I never though it would take me this far or this long. the initial plan was a completely different character to be exact, it was a humongous undertaking and every part of it from the dragon to the multitude of assets in the scene took their fair share to make at my current skill level, patience devotion were essential with the occasional mental breakdown.
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But for almost every "I" in this process breakdown, a "we" could easily be put in its place. None of what this project showcases would have been possible without the patience of my friend Alex (link below), who applied his skills and guided me as a mentor through pretty much every hurdle. I also want to give a shoutout to all my other friends who helped along the way (especially with Blender and Unreal! ).
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Writing out the full step-by-step process would take far too long, so all I'll say is: even though this was an extremely demanding project, I grew tremendously as an artist and can't wait to apply everything I learned to the next one!

https://www.artstation.com/alexander_s

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https://www.artstation.com/artwork/6vLyaW