Murmure and Seraphina of the Night Owl Order

After 5 months of work, I'm happy to present my latest game-ready characters based on this great artwork by Yohann Schepacz (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Ry9rDE).
Focusing on the whole body anatomy first, I worked on Murmure's high poly for ~2 months, from the 7th of November to Mid-December (1 month for the body, 1 month + for the clothing and detailing). I took a longer break during Christmas and then continued doing Retopology and UVing for a week and finally spend around 2 weeks on texturing, posing and shading, concluding work on him around the 26th of January. (Allthough I would still do some final texturing iterations once I had everything in Unreal and animated).
I set out with multiple goals, one of which was to improve my anatomy skills so everything (excluding the simulated clothing) was sculpted from scratch. Apart from the modeling, rigging, and rendering I also delved into animating, which was surprisingly fun and insightful! Rendering was done in Unreal Engine 5, except the utilities and turnarounds which were handled by Marmoset Toolbag.
Murmure's model ended up being around 90k tris using 8 texture sets (diffuse, normal, and ORM) plugged into 3 different master materials (split into body, clothing, and eyes).
Seraphina's model is 50k tris and uses the same master materials but with 4 texture sets and a multi UV-Set set-up to transfer the diffuse of the body to the fur-cards in UE. X-Gen was used to generate both the fur cards and the baked-in fur.
Both characters are fully rigged using the advanced skeleton plugin in Maya with manual reskinning.
Programs used include: PureRef, ZBrush, Marvelous Designer, Maya, Marmoset Toolbag, Substance Painter, Unreal Engine 5, Clip Studio Paint, and DaVinci Resolve.
I want to give a huge shout-out and thank you to my mentor Claudio Tumiati, who taught me a lot over the past half a year and without whom this project wouldn't have ended up half as good! I'm also super grateful for the support and companionship of my fellow Think Tank students and friends who kept me motivated and inspired throughout this long project!
Lastly, I want to thank Yohann Schepacz for allowing me to work on his concept, the paintings from his IP "CAT EMPIRE: ODONATA" immensely inspire me so anyone who hasn't yet checked out his work should change that ASAP!
https://www.artstation.com/oxanstudio