On Paper Explorations. Left, Gorey Creature, Right, Mixed Creature With Fins
If you have been following my thesis related posts, you’ll see that the latest design I’ve shown was the one of a star-fish like, alien looking creature. After discussing this design with my thesis chair, Professor Deborah Fowler, we concluded that this new design was lacking something that the initial design had; the one after the temporary review proposal.
So I went on and tried extracting and mixing the elements that I considered worked for both designs. The result is the following:
The result has a mix of limbs of the second one and a mix of the tentacles of the first and appendages of the tips of the second. Additionally, I tried to blend the design of surface appendages of both as well as retaining most of the vibrant colors of the first.
Even though I believe the mix was somewhat successful, I still felt that something was amiss with the creature. After this, it was time to go back to the drawing board, literally. The result was a design that was less of a crawling sea-like creature and more of a whimsical plant-based walking creature. Which took me closer to Denis Kozlov and Elena Kozlova‘s references. Something I like about this creature is that its locomotion would be closer to the one of the hunter, where legs actually play a part in the movement, rather than a creature that just crawls on the ground.
Initial Drawings and Color Exploration
After having a more clear idea of what I wanted to explore, I went on to develop the design in Houdini.
Test Render of the Cardoon Creature
Next steps would be to tweak and stress test the creature and then, as with the hunter, wrap it into an HDA as well as create controllers to customize it. Thank you for reading, until next post!
