Customizable Alien Cocoons (2023)

This is my second original, independent work after graduating from FIEA. Following up from my recent Customizable Alien Eggs, I decided to take on the "next stage of development" and create a pack of Customizable Alien Cocoons. As with the last one, this was created with the intent of selling on the Unreal Marketplace. I intended to take the experience and infrastructure I created during the eggs product to create a new set of visually similar, but distinct, props, with just as much user-friendly customizability as before. I would say that I achieved that goal with flying colors. As with the eggs, all aspects of the materials for the props here are parameterized, and easily accessed and modified by the user through material instances. With how much I enjoyed creating the previous set of alien egg props, and how cool they eventually came out, I decided I'd ride the momentum even further to create a sort of "sequel" pack. I believe I'm slowly building up to a sort of overarching project where I create a succession of visually similar packs, all under one big "alien hive" umbrella, and this is just the next step.
For the purpose of this project, I created 10 alien cocoon models - two variations each on a theme (from left to right, they are "bloated," "ceiling," "floor," "standing," and "wall," intended to give any scene with these cocoons in them a good deal of visual variety, and make them fit in with whatever environment they need to. Each of those ten models has three variant textures on the cocoon section, to give even more options - a smooth cocoon, a lumpy cocoon, and a veiny cocoon. The materials of these cocoons are highly customizable - the colors can be changed, the cocoon has detailed reflectiveness and opacity options, and there are built-in in-material animation options. To give the cocoons more detail, I also created five models for embryonic creatures to place inside the transparent cocoon portion - left to right, they are "beast," "blob," "bug," "humanoid," and "squid," which will help the user further customize the cocoon models to suit their needs. Like the cocoons, the creatures also have customizable materials, including emissive portions to give them eerie highlights. You may also notice a fun little detail with the embryo models, in that each of them seems to be a "grown up" version of the fetus models from the alien eggs project. Just another way I'm slowly developing these into a larger theme!
All of the items in this pack are below 10.6k triangles - most of them hover around or below the 5k mark, with the embryo models tending to skew a bit higher. This is to make sure that they're easy to use and don't unnecessarily strain user hardware.
This pack of models can be purchased on the Unreal Store, along with the contents of the previous project, at the following link: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/customizable-alien-eggs