Ahkmenrah

This began as a project to sculpt and 3D print a little Ahkmenrah figurine from Night At The Museum. I wanted to try and slightly stylize his outfit to be toy-like, as if this miniature copy of him could come to life like in toy story. He was intended to be put in 'Cairn City', a local place in Los Angeles where during the pandemic people on hikes in the hills would leave miniatures, toys, and notes amongst stone cairn buildings/bridges. For the render I also sculpted a Central Park lamppost, tree, and some snow to place him in his movie home of NYC.

I put special emphasis on getting Rami Malek's likeness readable in a small scale and from a distance. The main goal was the 3D print, and it needed to be recognizable at a glance without texture. The sculpt was sent to Ethan Gagorik, who modified the sculpture to work best as a print, and the final result was perfect! Tiny, golden Ahkmenrah now glitters proudly on my fireplace mantle at home.

The renders (with the addition of hand painted textures) were all done in Octane in order to keep the detail level at mid-res and let retopology be automatic. With my years of experience in quickly rendering characters for game advertising, I've optimized this workflow well. When working at Petrol Advertising for titles such as Saints Row, Dead Island 2, Cookie Run, Torchlight 3, and many more, it was common practice to pull assets from the game, bring the assets into maya/zbrush and upres to cinematic quality, overlay new high res details onto the textures, and then beauty render it in octane to go to illustrators. And due to the short turn around time in advertising, all these steps had to be done fast and precise with little flexibility for error. In other words, we improvised a lot of shortcuts. I used most of these in this piece. :)