Disco Snail
A fun little project that resulted from playing around in Substance 3D Designer and its procedural tiling functions. I affectionately started calling this little guy "disco snail" some time during the process, and the name stuck. All textures and models featured were created by me.
The final render! I'm particularly happy with how the tiles on the shell turned out.
Initially I'd intended to add volumetric fog for a "nightclub" feel, but ultimately cut it to shorten render time.
The twofold challenge of creating the disco ball texture was
1. Counteracting any warping on the individual tiles from the spherical shape of the shell model
2. Make each tile look hand-placed, by slightly randomizing the displacement and tilt of each one
The resulting maps of the disco ball. Note that the geometry of the tiles is entirely baked into the height map rather than being hard-modeled.
The most complicated aspect of the snail was actually the coloring! I wanted it to look like a garden snail, but since at the time of writing this, Substance3D did not support subsurface scattering, I had to fake the effect with a handful of gradient maps
The snail's skin was significantly easier than the disco ball once I figured out the "cell" nodes.