Aboleth - model

Finished modeling the Aboleth. He weighs in around 1950 tris. I want to keep the models pretty low poly.

He's a few meters tall and a few meters long. He's going to need a lot of bones for those tentacles! Next up is UVs and diffuse texture. It took 4 hours - Actually I think a little less than 4 but who's counting? Mostly because I had two fins on his back based on what I saw in the Monster Manual, but when I read up on Aboleths on Wikipedia, it said they only have one dorsal fin.

4e Monsters

This post marks the start of a crazy idea to model in 3d all the monsters in the new 4th edition monster manual.

I really like the art in the 4th edition D&D books. The Monster Manual is really well laid out this time around and the monsters look awesome. I'm a 3d game artist and I need to have more models in my portfolio so it seemed to me like a fun time to model all the 4e monsters. I'm not doing this for my job or to sell the models or anything like that. Just using some nice art as concept art / model sheets.

There are about 155 monsters - so it's going to take a while. I want to move fast so I don't get bored and have this thing die 1/2 finished. I'm going to try to kit-bash as much as I can to speed things up and focus on learning new skills.

I estimated the hours for the following:
low-poly model (4)
UVs (2)
diffuse texture (3)
bone (1)
rig (1)
skin (2)
high-poly (4)
normal map (1)
specular map (1)
ambient occlusion map (1)

That's 20 hours per monster times 155 monsters = 3,100 hours. That means I'm going to be at this for the next year or so depending on how much free time I can set aside for this. I may have to change those hour estimates after doing a couple and seeing how they turn out. If I move this fast the quality may stink. Maybe my personal quality will improve over time. We'll see I guess.

Keeping my fingers crossed.