Devourer Golem Reflective Paint Job
I started out with this one not really being what I wanted in terms of how the colors felt except in the emissive range. I've always felt this way, although I've enjoyed the emissive colors and the actual model greatly. Essentially the base model was too flat, though, and didn't feel exotic enough. The metallic/roughness/occlusion painting by the artist (Blue) on it originally was great, but didn't translate over into my shaders very well. What she was seeing in Maya/Substance Painter was really different from what I was seeing. Sometimes that happens, particularly with custom shaders and different IBL (the HDRI type lighting).
This was a chance for me to go back and approach it differently, and my initial inclination was to do the fake-translucency that I had tried on the nemesis recently, but it was looking very strange. The fake reflection/refraction was also picking up some ghostly letters from I don't know where. Mildly freaked out my kids, who were sitting with me helping pick out things. I can't decide if that was some artifact from textures still stored in the material despite my changing properties (unity is funny like that), or if it was some sort of cached data from the GPU. Whatever the case, it was extremely bizarre and the letters could be read clearly but made no sense and were stylized in a way that I don't recognize from any of the stuff in this game or any other programs I've run recently. Shrug.
Anyway, that approach wasn't working out in general, so after 45 minutes of fiddling I decided what I really wanted was the sense of it being metallic / liquid in the first place, more than glassy / metallic. So I tweaked a heck of a lot of stuff on an the now-standard-for-golems cubemap shader that I created today, and completely swapped out the normal map to give micro-details that you can see in this video.
And thus we have the new devourer golem. It's a bit on the dark side, but never so much that you can't see it, and it doesn't have really bright specular highlights so it never flashes at you crazily. I may return to this again in the future, particularly if I can perfect a fake-refraction/reflection shader that also includes an emissive output, but for now I'm pleased with this.