Tupandactylus IV

I spent the past week taking the time to paint and sculpt the Tupandactylus model. I initially started by trying out 3D-Coat thanks to a recommendation I received.  I painted the diffuse color map in 3D-Coat, and there is a lot about the program that I really like a lot. It's very easy to pick up, and there are a lot of nice tools. When it came to sculpting, I had so much trouble getting  it to properly export a displacement map. It was also crashing constantly, which was incredibly surprising, because of the specs of the machine I was working on. After about a day of trying to get it to work, I then turned to ZBrush for the sculpting which worked spectacularly. It was like reuniting with an old friend in a way, considering it's been almost a year to the day since I've used it last.

For sculpting reference, I used a number of diagrams of proposed pterosaur musculature as a loose guide. I also threw in my own knowledge of crocodylian musculature to help sculpt in the major muscle masses. A lot of the fine detail was influenced by birds, a few minor details from bats, and even some influence from lizards. I looked at a lot of pelicans, cormorants, parrots, and condors to try to get some nice face wrinkles. There's a lot of detailed skin texture which is kind of difficult to see on the wider images (click for larger view).

Now I need to work on getting the diffuse, displacement, and normal maps to properly transfer to Houdini so I can move on from texturing. 

-Evan