Felling Axe Asset

* Purchase here: https://artstn.co/m/az9y

This project was a chance to refresh my pipeline and expand into a few new areas. In particular, I wanted to learn Quixel's Mixer now that it's handling custom meshes. Also important to me was the concepting stage which I spent extra time on to get some practice. When I've got the time, I enjoy getting caught on as many learning obstacles as I can as they push me to improve.

The design itself started with a vision of an axe in a stump. It was important that it be useful for learning Mixer, so I focused on giving it a realistic style relatively free of the traditional stylized weapons that would have been better suited to hand painting. This hampered my concepting to some extent--a strong axe doesn't have a dozen accessories drilled through the haft or shoddy smithing on the head--yet I was able to focus on my painting instead. That original design holds up against the finished renders with the main differences being tweaks to the palette.

After finishing the asset, I poured some more of my quarantine time into pushing my render techniques. The tree renders and forest turntable were composed using assets from the Megascans library which I've just started getting into as well.