12. Skifter Crab

In the last few months, I have been focusing my efforts on the creation of several creatures with the intent of seeing what sort of quality I could produce in the final images.
I started this creature with the same armature style I discussed previously, a case of putting it into practice to see how it fitted with the workflow.

The design itself was done very much on the fly, drawing influences from certain things as it went. As it transpires this is definitely not the best way to go about design. Planning and sketching are vital and it is something that I should've done in these designs. It would save a lot of time when it came to finishing up the model in ZBrush.

Above are a few of the inspirations I drew upon when designing.

Above is the final Zbrush sculpt, something that too much time was spent on due to a lack of sketching and preliminary concepting. As discussed above it is something that is vital and something I shall be focusing on more when it comes to future designs.

In creating the rig that allows the model to move I struck upon a realisation in just how important understanding the underlying anatomy - and not just the superficial musculature - is. Understanding whats going on at deeper levels of the anatomy will help to figure out how creatures move. 

In relation to this I am wanting to adopt a method employed by Alex Alvarez which involves using a profile sketch of the design to create a rough rigged model, to help quash any issues with the characters movement at an early stage while its still easy to fix. Coupling this method with a greater understanding and planning of anatomy during the concepting phase will aid greatly in producing better creatures.

In the creation of this scene I wanted to extend the quality to all aspects of it, with the focus still being on the creature. In doing this I employed various techniques when it came to setting up the materials that provided me with a decent result while still being pleasing to look at.

The various trees and grasses are all created using PaintFX within Maya, a piece of the software I had not previously used and wanted to get acquainted with. While I was very pleased with the created meshes and the way they are able to be customised and edited. However I wasn't pleased with the shader created for them and so I created my own VRayMtl for each created PaintFX asset. A Blend Material that made use of a Ramp for the diffuse, and a map created in photoshop that serves as opacity/bump.