Oh dear...

Turns out my inexperience has once again been my downfall. I have constructed this model quite badly. Because of the shapes I've used to construct this when we come to animate there will be hella lots of distortion. So I'll have to start again right?

Wrong! We're going to cheat! Yeah!

So we're going to use a ready made model then alter it to make it into a swamp monster. I'm making the robot arm, Perri is doing the rest.

Because an artificial arm needs to work without distortion/painting weights etc I've made it with joints that would actually work. I used the robot arms found on assembly lines as reference and made this:

James can rig this right away, which is good.

My next job is lighting. I've got to get it exactly right in order to make the creature look like he belongs in the world with the runner.

Model

OK, Low poly done, gonna give it to Perri and she's gonna sculpt the shit out of it, as she already knows how to use mudbox. I'm gonna make a couple more low poly versions in order to get a good tutorial made for our other project. Take a goddamn look, yo

Now you're probably looking at these and thinking to yourself "gosh this chap is sexy". And my response to that is that you're a sick bastard. Also, you may be noticing that the left non robotic arm is lower than the robot arm, I did that because I heard that it puts less stress on organic joints to pose them in a more natural position as opposed to the traditional t pose. Not sure if it's true, but it kind of makes sense, as if you think about it, holding an arm up like in a t pose would require a fair amount of muscle work... Didn't worry about it with the robot arm as metal doesn't have muscle deformation.

Mother crunching designs!

I've done a lot of designs for the monster... let's see if we can follow my thought process as we journey through my imagination... Also, see if you can spot the subtle point where my scanner had a senile moment and made everything blue, meaning I had to recolour everything

I basically spent these first few drawings getting to grips with the direction I wanted to go with it, the robot arm idea was Nat's, which works pretty nicely because it means I can make the actual monster quite athletic but still give him loads of strength. I've tried to show off his athletacism a couple of times here. Still not sure how I'm going to do the robot arm at this point

Obviously up until this point I've not really settled on a design for the face, I pretty much picked one I liked based on a mixture of the creature from the black lagoon's actual face and a mud skipper, but I really wanted to experiment more and see what feel I could get from different combinations of animal influences. They've all got their advantages and disadvantages, and some of them are bloody hilarious, but I think aside from a few tweaks I'm going to end up going with my first idea.

Here I really wanted to start thinking about body and muscle structure, as well as how the robot arm would work. I've not really got anything perfect but I've definately got enough to get my low poly model made up. For the robot arm I'm going to give it a semi organic structure, like the first set of designs there, but more of an artificial overall feel like the second half. Most of the muscle can be added in sculpting, which Perri is doing later, but it's important to have some concrete reference for it.

Phew! I guess we'll get going with modelling now! Stuff up soon.

Monster!

I have been thinking about what to use for our monster. I was thinking maybe we could have some kind of 40s or 50s b movie kind of feel... then I though what monsters could work... After a bit of pondering I settled on the Creature From the Black Lagoon.

Fuck no you can't have a hug.

He's got a kind of charm to him hasn't he... Almost like a scooby do villain. And yet, all he'd need is the slightest of tweaks to make him rather threatening. So he's my starting point, gonna get to work on designing a threatening monster based on our friend here.

New Project

So the project that I'm working on right now is a compositing piece. Early ideas were influenced by parkour. We wanted to get a chase scene where our protagonist was agile enough to escape from something stronger and faster than him, someone who could use skill to overcome difficult odds. Someone adept at parkour would be perfect for this. Something like this only... not quite so extreme. Gotta be realistic. Don't have the budget for that. What we do have, however, is 3D modeling and animation skill. So we'll make the chase scene using some kind of enemy not possible in real life. A monster perhaps...