Some Creatures

It's been a while since I've posted. I've been much more active these days over at 90 minute comics. I have some ideas for some interesting things brewing though, which I'm not at liberty to talk about until substantial progress has been made though.

Anyway, this is just a quick post of some fun things I've posted on my facebook page but realized never made it to here. First, since the world desperately needs more critically endangered Saiga antelopes, I spent a couple hours getting back into ZBrush and roughing one out.

(click to bigify)

I would like to get better with starting sculpts from scratch in ZBrush instead of taking the time to first do a low-res base mesh in Maya, so that's what this was an experiment in.

Next up, is just a digital sketch of a dragon I did when I didn't have any ideas for one night of 90 minute comics. This was done in Photoshop in the allotted comics time...so 90 minutes. It was fun to just make it up off the top of  my head as I went. Been a while since I had such an enjoyable sketch session :)

(click to bigify)

I'll try to be more regular. Sorry about the hiatus!

Best,

  Evan

Tupandactylus VI: Final Product

Alas the time has arrived! Sorry it's been a while since I've posted on this guy. I think the difference between the last image posted and this finished animation will speak for itself!




I also decided to do this making-of video. Houdini's procedural nature allowed me to show off some of this process really easily, so I took the time to edit this together:



I hope you enjoy! I really had a lot of fun delving into Pterosaur anatomy. Unfortunately due to time and other obligations at work, I cut the shot in half. The second half would have showed some quadrupedal walking and launching. The motion is all blocked out, but that's where it must remain for now (sigh). I hope sometime in the future I get the chance to revisit it. I really want to play with such a bizarre animal walking. Despite the cut, I'm really excited about the project! Thanks for tuning in!

-Evan

Tupandactylus I

For an individual portfolio-building project at work, I've decided to build a full creature in Houdini; doing everything from modeling to animating to rendering. I've also taken this opportunity to do something I've wanted to do for quite some time: build a pterosaur. More specifically, the  tapejarid, Tupandactylus imperator.

To prep, I've been doing a lot of reading about pterosaur anatomy; mostly Dr. David Unwin's Pterosaurs: from Deep Time, as well as from other sources such as http://pterosaur.net/ and portions of various papers and websites. Due to the lack of time I have to complete this, I'm obviously not going to hit the books nearly as hard as I did for my Master's Thesis. I just have been casually reading and using my modeling sessions as a way of testing my understanding. It's been fun so far. I want it to be authentic enough, and true to the animal without killing myself over every minor anatomical detail.

Here are some images of what I have thus far. So far I've completed the base model (much more detail will eventually be sculpted in), and I've laid out the bones which will be used for the control rig.

First the model:

...and the bone layout:

I took my time with the model to try to make sure I was able to create it in a way that would work for both the flying and walking motions. Being conscious of this, before spending the time in connecting the model to the bones, I first adjusted the skeleton into a quadrupedal stance to make sure the dimensions of the animal would work.

This has been a fun project so far, and I'm excited to get a working rig. Painting the skin texture and adding the "pycnofibres" should be fun as well :P

As always, comments, suggestions, feedback, etc. are welcome!

-Evan

Houdini Modeling II

Welp, I finished that guy. I discovered a bunch of options and little tricks that helped make the rest of this go so much quicker. Very exciting to know that I can model a full character in Houdini now.

-Evan

Houdini Modeling

This is what I do when work gets slow...experiment/learn.

I decided to take a break from rigging and tackle organic modeling in Houdini... it's not nearly as bad as I was expecting, but I am still much quicker in other packages.

Here is a hippo (Hippopotamus amphibius):

-Evan