Thoracosaurus neocesariensis

Thoracosaurus neocesariensis

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Sculpting Work

Here are my digital sculpts (Click the images for high-res view). I put a lot more detail into the skin through ZBrush, after Autodesk Mudbox was giving me a lot of trouble with memory handling. Constant crashes and clunky pipelines drove me to ZBrush which has been much more stable. All of the scale detail is from black and white "alphas" sampled from actual crocodylian images. The tail and underbelly came from an alligator, and the sides, neck and arms came from gharial texture reference. It could be a bit cleaner but ZBrush is giving me a problem with subdividing one more level. It should be enough detail for now, but I'm looking for methods to get that final subdivision level that would make it all around polished. I might be able to achieve it through adjustments to the exported displacement map in Photoshop. Anyway, next is painting the skin and attaching the skin to the muscles (which seems to be relatively straight forward from the tests I did). I got approval on my muscles from Dr. Dodson, other than a few minor tweaks in positioning that I have to do. Mostly the back muscles didn't go quite high enough, so I will adjust that. Hopefully I will be getting some more motion tests out this weekend or early next week if all goes to plan! Very Exciting!



On another note, check out the recent article in the Drexel Triangle that talks about the Drexel Paleo program, as well as mentions a bit about my project, here.

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