Thorny Devil

Prosses during this project:

First, I decided what to make and what its purpose was. I chose Thorny Devil because I haven't done scales before, so that would be a new challenge.

Next I gathered reference, watched videos and learnt facts about the Thorny Devil e.g. the thorny devil only eats ants, soaks water up from its skin then brings to its mouth, lives in the deserts of Australia and cannot survive in humid or rainy environments and they have a fake head to offer up to prey instead of losing their real head.
The reference had top view, bottom view, side view, view of scales, view of skeleton and close ups on face.

Then I drew over the reverence and marked up the basic shapes.
I then created these shapes in ZBrush, dyna meshed it to join then re-meshed, I started the first pass getting the silhouette. I kept pressing the v hotkey which shows the black outline of the lizard. This helped keep the shape accurate.
Second pass, was mid-level detail this is when I marked out where the spikes typically were and got the shape of the face correct, which was very important as they have a distinct dopey looking face.
Third pass, I started the scales. This was achieved by creating alphas and finding alphas in the ZBrush alpha library. I also manually added scales when the masks weren't giving the desired look.
The last pass, I finalized the sculpt by looking at the reference and marking out all distinct spikes, making the fake head a tad smaller and moving the jaw a little forward.
I then decimated the high poly model from 26 mill to 17 mill. This was the lowest I could get that kept the details. I exported into maya and exported it as a GPU Cache File then re-imported and started retopology.

In retopology I made the large spikes and skimmed over the rest. This is because the height map would add them back later, then I made loops around the areas that would deform such as the mouth, legs and eyes. I the filled in the rest.

Unwrapping was quite quick on this model. The unwrapping process really clicked for me, and I managed to unwrap it the first time with no errors, I layed out automatically then re-sized to get the same pixel density across the UV shells. Then I made the head and body a little bigger. I used the UV tile workflow in order to get maximum detail which would help with realism.

Texturing, I baked the high polly onto the low then started texturing. during texturing I looked at the references an looked at the most common pattern on the lizards then marked out those patterns on the model, after that I was looking at the texture of the lizards scales and did my best to replicate the rough scales on the model. I then tackled the mouth and tongue where I made them look fleshy.

Rigging, I added the joints and named the as I went along so it wouldn't be such a big task latter on, I then bind the skin and used paint weights to fix any unwanted deformation. Next was creating the controls and constraints.

Animating, I watched videos of how the lizard moved and created animations that replicated that. in this proses I blocked out key poses then kept refining till I reached the desired result; a very helpful tool I always use wen animating is the animation graph editor.

Rendering, I set up the camera shots based on my notes I took whilst listening to the music chosen, then I set up the lighting by using a sky dome light and edited the light in the attribute editor. I then composited the rendered shots in aftereffects changing the shot in time with the second drumbeat.

To summarize techniques I used was blocking out shapes, checking the lizards anatomy/skeleton, drawing over reference to find the shapes, making notes of what I observed in the texture of the lizard and crossing off when I have created that texture. Also checking silhouette, watching videos and seeing how the animal actually looks and interacts with the environment this helped me understand the animal and create a more realistic depiction of it.