Andres Ortiz-Mena Gonzalez Project 1: Quetzalcoalt

Sorry I hadn't been able to post all of this to the blogsite before.
For the first week, at first I though of reworking older projects but then I thought, what fun would that be, one just doesn't retouch something they already made, why not start from scratch, making something digitally knowing that it will be printed and become a real piece people can touch, feel and even display, so I thought long and hard and came up with something which reflected my background and culture. Even though I doubt there's remotely any mayan or aztec blood in me, being born and raised in Mexico I was always exposed to a rich and old culture dating centuries back, legends of gods and warriors and much more. So for my model I chose the Aztec god of the sun Quetzalcoalt, also known as Kukulkan in the mayan culture. Even though there are always different representatins for this god, he is always a gigantic feathered snake that has the power of flight.

I used the images above as main reference, while also looking at pictures of realistic snakes, to have a mixture of the sylized and the realistic

With all those references I decided to hop onto Maya and start modelling my mytical god, the pose I decided shows Quetzalcoalt pointing towards the sky as if getting ready to take flight ready to go back to the Sun.

As you can notice, the base model is extremely simplistic as I have lately started experimenting using Zbrush to try to make the most of the model possible, I am not that good with it yet so I usually make the base mesh in maya first and then import that

After sculpting all of the extra details I went ahead and painted on top of the model, learning in the process how to lay out the UVs in zbrush in order to be able to export it to Keyshot and have the textures not spaz all over the model

Here we can see in keyshot the millions of polygons the model ended up with

And here's all ready to be printed out in shapeways

I painted out my own materials in order to give it the colors one would expect from something coming out of Mexico. And I feel the final product was very close to what I was hoping to achieve.