Recreation of Manchu's Cover Illustration for Héritage (1995)
This is my digital recreation of Philippe 'Manchu' Bouchet's cover illustration for Héritage, the French release of Legacy (1995) by Greg Bear, as part of my ongoing university assignment. I chose this artwork because it struck me as being particularly alien, with nice composition and depth. This is an exercise in 3D modelling an environment directly from reference. As such, this current version omits the three characters, though they will be added later when I update this post.
Most of the modelling was done in ZBrush, while some of the UVs and retoplogy were done in Maya. Texturing was done in Photoshop and Substance Painter. I made all the assets myself.
This has been a fun, albeit challenging, project so far and I intend to finish it by including the three characters shown in the original illustration.
Working Render
left: Philippe 'Manchu' Bouchet's original illustration; right: My recreation in Unreal Engine 5
For the rock spires, I began by splitting the reference image up into smaller segments and modelling them separately.
I would have the front and back sides resemble two separate segments of the reference.
I then placed these segments on top of one another and used ZBrush's Array Mesh feature to instantiate them upwards in gradually smaller instances.
I then worked on a separate ridged spire...
...Which was then layered beneath the previous segments and blended together to add to the ridged texture of the original.
Many of the finer details on the alien creatures had to be exaggerated so that they would mix nicely with the lighting setup in UE5.
Realistic lighting in UE5 did not always match the reference, so several lights were set up on different lighting channels to help believably achieve the lighting of the original.
The creatures' 'tongues' are created in-engine using a customised spline blueprint.