Mature Drill Spider - Ashes Of Creation

The second project during my time at Intrepid Studios. I had the priviledge to choose from a list of thing on what assets I would like to work on and I chose the Mature Drill Spider mount/npc to venture more outside of my comfort zone and gain experience working with real-time fur.
Baking the x-gen generated groom into the textures was something I had never done before and had to experiment a bit with, trying to make it work. Luckily for me there was great documentation on it by the wonderful Jessica Jennings and after a bit of trial and error, playing around with strand thickness and density I was able to make it work!
Another fun challenge with this project was making the spider design fit the scorpion rig, as the regular spider rig did not match the design well enough. It was the first time I worked in that order, since I previously rigged my characters after finishing the modeling parts and not based my modeling on an existing rig.
Working with lower resolution textures and making sure that the asset works in even lower resolutions was also a bit challenging with this asset, due to the high number of legs. After a round of feedback with the team I re-did my initial UV layout, where every leg on one side had a seperate UV shell (which was then mirrored), and duplicated and deformed the front leg to fit all of the other leg spaces and kept the UVs stacked. This allowed for a higher texel density and improved the efficiency of the UV layout.
Since this was my introduction to a lot of workflows I didn't have previous experience in I learned a lot that I was able to apply to later projects!
Had a blast working on this, especially with the kind encouragement and feedback from the team at Intrepid Studios. :3 ❤