We continue our Beasts and monsters series with a beast I made for a very low budget film a few years ago. The true terror of the skies of the phylum: Chordata. This Pterodactyl was a bit character. I modeled and textured it. The shots and rendering were handled by others. I will give a shout out to the animator Ryan White. Working a production requires a lot of communication and understanding of other artists roles. It also means that your vision must be in line with the directors. At the beginning of this project all I knew he wanted a flying dinosaur. So creating a character with life with the line "I will know what I like when I see it." is pretty much saying this is going to take a lot of time and I don't care about you. It was supposed to look like claymation. After going through a lot of different dinosaurs they settled on this guy.
This is an untextured, unrendered shot of the pterodactyl swooping its wings forward slowing down. I modeled the Pterodactyl in Maya and put all the fine detail and textured in Zbrush.
In the past, I mentioned "Edgeflow" in earlier posts. Edgeflow is the concept that polygons only fold on their edges. It also minimizes how many polygons you need to hold a form during animation. Having the correct edgeflow is really important. These lines drawn over the model are the edges that I am talking about, they smoothly wrap around and hold the form correctly.
All the little fine detail and lighting information is sculpted into the normal map. The normal map makes a flat polygon accept lighting information as if it was cut up into many smaller polygons facing different ways.
Here is the Pterodactyl with the color added. Next, I add some other maps so it accepts light through the thin parts of it's body.
At that Point my work is nearly done, I just had to communicate with my rigger and animator.
Here is a gif of an animation that was worked on and sent back after feedback. You can see the flying beast pushing its wings forward to slow down.
Here is an gif of its normal motion. Note how the pectoral muscles flex correctly, this is because of a good rig and proper edgeflow. You can see once again it grabbing at the air to push its self forward it is not just an up and down motion. At this point it was handed off to the shots and rendering guys. They sent me this back. there is no sound in this video so I do not get DMCAed by myself or some dumb Hollywood crap. The Gag bit is included in the video.
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