Week 3

By the second last week into this unit I had focused on finishing the sculpt for my creature. The process of sculpting its head was the hardest because the skeleton of the komodo was a complex structure when viewed from a different perspectives- the head from the front looked nearly frog like and wide but from the side it was quite slender, with an angular jawline and this made the process of going back and forth on the mesh quite messy.

the komodo dragon's head in wireframe view

I had to remodel the head twice, since the first time it resembled a mammal rather than a reptile, and the front looked a bit too much like a dog's muzzle. For the eyes I made them separately with spheres, and attached the iris to the lids, since they had multiple wrinkles and folds, and it was important to get these details accurate.

sculpting the structure of the head

sculpting the details of the folds of the eye

I ultimately realized that my references were the issue because the male and female komodo had these characteristics that helped tell them apart but only confused me further and made me feel like I was staring at an optical illusion.

sculpting the head fins as the ears

For sculpting the body of the creature that included its fins, I used the Pliosaurus as reference, and the komodo for the large and slender tail and curved throat that hung below of its jawline. Once I completed the sculpting its structure I moved onto detailing it. I needed to give the surface, of its body a rock texture and for this used a collection of brushes that had the texture specifically of sandstone rocks, since that’s the material that was used to construct Angkor in the 12th century and helped accentuate the archaic feel to the environment.

sculpting details of the sandstone rock texture

viewpoint of it in above the water

I added water to the environment before experimenting with an HDRI background to influence the lighting. I knew I wanted it to be quite dim and forested with the main source of light being the glowing eyes and the symbol above its head to resemble that of the mythical carvings on the temple walls- which was a crescent moon.

checking the creature in the rendered view

experimenting with light

experimenting with textures on the creature in the rendered view and atmospheric lighting

Additionally, I knew I had to work on the final concept in photoshop and export my character turnarounds from Blender since most of the detailing had to be done there because the image textures that I placed on the creature were getting stretched due to the topology of the mesh.

the outcome was quite terrifying.