Oculus the Swamp Creature

3D Model

I designed and built this lil’ guy for CGChat’s Dominance War 4 contest in 2009.

I named him “Oculus” due to all the eyes - bear in mind this was a good 2-3 years before Palmer Luckey formed his VR company! Somewhat ironic that I work in VR game development now?

He was mainly sculpted in ZBrush, with hard surface work, lowpoly and UVs done in 3dsmax, then all baked in XNormal and textured with Photoshop. The workflow back then was all diffuse/specular/normal, but I’ve chosen to shoehorn that all into PBR materials here (without any texture editing) because it looks a bit nicer on Sketchfab than the old-school approach.

Note that the base was made purely for “beauty renders” and wasn’t part of the original 10,000 triangle budget, hence the horrible lack of optimisation.