Week 13

For the past week I have started working on my Therizinosaurus project. As suggested by one of my classmates, I decided to create my own orthographics first. That way, it will be a lot easier for me to work from rather than the concept art alone. This is what I have done this week.

These are the two references that I worked from. The first is a skeleton diagram that I used for the shape and then I added some of the design elements from the second concept image. It still needs a lot of work and I need to do more anatomy reference before I'm finished but I am happy with the results so far.

 There isn't a lot of time left in the semester so I probably won't get much farther than the concept art and maybe a basic sculpt but I am planning on getting as far as I can and then continuing this project after I graduate.

Week 12

This week I finished the carnivorous plant project.

Carnivorous Plant by nicolej on Sketchfab

I have also spent a lot of time collecting reference material. I am planning on sculpting a therizinosaurus is zBrush based on the following reference image.

The Therizinosaurus was a dinosaur with the largest known claws of any animal. The claws could get as  long as two feet in length. The Therizinosaurus was an herbivore and likely used it's claws to collect leaves and for defense.

It was also likely at least partially covered in feathers.

Other reference and artist renditions:

Week 11

This week I have been working on texturing my carnivorous plant project. It took me a while to get the file ready and imported into Substance Painter (I had to revisit a few of the Substance Painter Fundamentals videos from 420) but I finally got it imported and was also able to import a normal map that I created in zBrush (although it was upside down to begin with---strange).

I spent about 10 hours or so texturing it and I am pretty happy with how it is turning out. I haven't gotten very far on the pot and roots yet but those shouldn't take very long at all to texture compared to the plant, which is now finished. I also worked on exporting some of the maps to make sure it was working correctly. I also noticed that there is a preset for Sketchfab which is where I was planning to put this model so that was a great find. It seems like it will export the model and textures straight to my account there so it will make exporting the whole thing a lot easier.

My textured plant model in Substance Painter:

Pot and Roots, WIP:

At the moment, I'm losing a lot of the detail of the pot so I'll have to find ways of bringing some of that detail back. Also, I haven't gotten to the dirt yet so, at the moment, it is the same color as the pot. I did have the dirt finished but then substance painter crashed and I lost an hour or two of work. So, now, I'm working to repeat the work that I lost.