Metroid Fan Art: Realistic 3D concept art

I often thought it would be cool to see a more realistic version of the Samus character from Metroid. This is an attempt at leveraging 3D to make some high quality concept art, a process that I have been practicing a lot lately and have come to really enjoy. Initially I was gonna keep the project pretty basic and small, but I got really excited working on this and took it much further then I initially intended.

The idea for this is Samus fights her way to an ancient alien relic which will unlock a new ability for her which she is holding. On the way she took some battle damage.

The workflow here is pretty simple: 1. Loose 3d sculpt with no uv's just highpoly in zbrush. 2. Export to keyshot and apply procedural materials. 3. Did a quick uv and damage paint (substance painter) of the face since that's the only thing that can't really be done procedurally. 4. Setup cameras and lighting for various render passes in keyshot. 5. Composite in photoshop. 6. paintover in photoshop and done.

During this process I learned a bunch and developed some of my own best practices. One of which was how I handle the hair portion (painting over 3d block-in). If your interested in my process specifically, I made a tutorial and put it up for sale on artstation here: https://www.artstation.com/bradmyers82/store

I had a lot of fun with this, I hope you guys like my take on this old classic!