Pedro Pupa

Pedro Pupa is the most beloved - and my personal favourite - villian from Earthworm Jim 2 which is one of, if not the greatest, video game of all time. He is a giant two-legged unicycle-riding maggot and the owner and operator of the mines of Planet Burbank. He lives under the rich soil along with his children and his workers, the ants.

Pedo Pupa is the final boss on the level "Lorenzen's Soil" and features one of the most bangin' video game tracks of all time: "Subterranean", composed by Tommy Tallarico. I used the SNES version which may not be as good as the original Sega version but I wanted to stay true to my childhood and I was too poor for a Genesis.

Special thanks to:
https://www.artstation.com/nixin
For providing some invaluable feedbacks along the way and some dope 2d artwork (coming in a future post).

Modelling: Pedro and the Ants were sculpted in ZBrush. All the hard-surface stuff was modelled in Houdini with a tiny bit of Maya.
Rigging: Houdini, KineFX
Animation: Houdini, KineFX. All of the animation is completely procedural largely driven by sin and cos functions and secondary motion solver.
Texturing: Substance Painter
Lookdev / Materials: Karma, MaterialX
Lighting / Rendering: Houdini, Karma
Comp / Finishing: Nuke, Resolve

*The ground texture and the dirt mound are courtesy of Quixel Megascans.