Work-in-Progress: Swamp Monster (Part II)

Not much done this week.  I am almost done with retopolizing the feet, as seen left.  I am not completely happy with the volume, but I will fix that with one of the later sculpting passes.  Hopefully this retopologizing and adding detail picks up this week since work is changing shifts and I should be able to allot a little more time during the week.  With any luck I will finish the legs and move on to other sections, hopefully adding a little more detail, making it easier to connect the dots instead of just remaking the base mesh with a much higher polygon count.  Until next time,
~gunnah

Oops, missed a little while; Work-in-Progress: Swamp Monster (Part I)

I guess I should start off with I am not dead, just got a little busy over the last few weekends.  I accomplished only a few things on existing projects, so I am not going to mention them.  However, I have been keeping up with tutorials and posts about my particular modeling software and I have a few new outlooks.  The first is that I want to try a sculpting project.  While sculpting has very little benefit for my game itself, outside any statue models perhaps; I am hoping learning sculpting produces an interesting organic model for my portfolio.  Despite the interest in trying sculpting, my impulse alone would not have driven me to start yet another project.  But a few choice words in a modeling article would, and that is exactly what I found.  The modeling software I use is free and attracts many people trying to learn 3D modeling.  Since people with a formal education in a related field usually have access to expensive software, not mentioning companies who hire those artists, very few tend to migrate to the free program.  This has resulted in a general gap between the general body of work made in the expensive programs and those made in the free programs.  With the build-up out of the way, I can get to the pearl of wisdom: Separate from the crowd.  Sounds simple enough, but quite a few people look only to other users of their software, ignoring the more general and higher quality 3D scene at large.  This is what drove me to starting this new project.  Plus the fact there is a contest for it.  (I know I have a poor track record with contests, but with the length of this one, I am hoping for a little better showing.)

The contest is to make a swamp creature that would scare you to death.  The contest is very open, it just has to be a creature that looks like it would hunt in a swamp and be able to hunt human hunters.  I bean by thinking of ideas for what kinds of creatures live in a swamp and outside the crocodile could not come up with any very large creatures - most others were just vicious little ones.  Then came the tough question, how to improve on a beast that pre-dates the dinosaurs?  My answer: give it wings and longer legs.  The legs are a by-product of needing something to manipulate a catch.  Left is the very early base mesh I am using to block in my ideas.  My key aspects are a crocodile-like head, bat-like wings and raptor-like claws (raptor referring to the group of birds not the dinosaur) .

With the silhouette to my liking and all the main aspects in, I decided to retopologize the mesh adding in what I am calling the mid-level details.  Left is how far I have come, obviously needing quite a bit of work still with this step.  My goal is to add all the teeth, spines, eyes, ears and bony bumps into the mesh before starting the sculpting process.  Mostly because I think these aspects need a little more precision and would look a little odd if left to a novice sculptor.  Note that I started retopologizing the arms because I felt the muscles needed were inadequately represented in he base mesh.  The arms are by no means close to finished, but give a much better image of how I want the final image to look.

Left is the two above images overlaid to give a better idea of what I am trying to make.  Again, living in a swamp, I am trying to make it look semi-aquatic.  The only main detail missing is webbing in the talons.  Once I have finished the retopologizing which may take some time while /I figure out details I want to add, I will move on to the sculpting portion.  My first pass will be muscle tone in the jaw, wings and legs.  My second pass will be small details like scales.  Finally I am going to make an asymmetric sculpt pass to add scaring, damage to the wings, breaks in spikes or teeth.  While I am not sure I will be able to get ll I want to finished by the deadline, I hope to get most of it and use the finished image as a starting point for a portfolio.