Metroid Fusion Fan Art - The Final Encounter
This piece is a fan-depiction of the final moments of the game "Metroid Fusion", developed and published by Nintendo.
It was first intended to be a soft entry into Blender, playing around mostly with sculpt tools. I wanted to try my hand at interpreting the orginial artworks for the fusion suit, but it quickly evolved into making a depiction of one of my favourite moments in the game.
The project involves the two characters, fully modeled, lookdeved and rigged in Blender. I tried to explore as many aspects of the DCC as I went. Custom textures were created in Substance Painter 2. I also used Houdini to make some of the environment assets and the veins running across the fusion suit.
Most of the designs, including the recreation of the operations deck are based on original promotional art for Metroid Fusion and Super Metroid, or from in-game sprites.
Of course, this project is an homage to the Metroid franchise, of which Nintendo holds the copyright to all designs!
HDRIs were found here: https://polyhaven.com/
I used this: http://planetmaker.apoapsys.com/ To generate SR388 (awesome stuff!)
I used this: https://www.deviantart.com/kerast/art/Dust-particles-on-lens-461101707 for some extra lens dirt, thanks for that Kerast!
I wanted to try a design that stayed true to the original concept, while incorporating some organic "metroid" elements, while keeping proportions and rendering realistic.
I played a lot with look development in Cycles for this character, using animated shaders for the vein effect, and a blended iridescent material for her body armor, to try to emulate the yellowing effect happening in the sprite artwork.
I based SA-X closely on the official high-resolution Super Metroid artwork released around Dread.
The operations deck was very much built to fit the needs of the main shot, so I didn't go into too much detail on most objects. Most of them also use procedural shading, straight in Blender, rather than traditional textures.