May 1, 2011

New Head, Lips and All.

After a long morning of errands I earned a quality lazy afternoon watching two hockey games. For the record if the teams logo is finned I'm cheering for them (aka the Cauncks and the Sharks, in that order of priority).

While enjoying my hockey I am casually working on my various Dinosaur projects. Today saw the Gorgosaurus get a lot of TLC (especially during the Bruins/Flyers... couldn't care less as to who wins).

I'm very pleased with how the shader is turning out. Just the digits to go now.

He might look a little funny, but that's cause I'm going with a new trend in Theropod reconstruction after a brief conversation with Phil Currie. That being lips. In his opinion, supported by lip ridges on the skulls, Theropods needed to cover their teeth to keep them from drying out and cracking.

So I put them on this guy (I had put them on Larry, but he hadn't really appeared on Traumador since), and it just looks odd. This is more due to tradition.


Its not that he is packing. Check out those pearly whites.



I was surprised how much I STILL had fix this guys head. Considering how much work I put into the Lillian model a year ago I was saddened to see how many more modifications I had to match this Sloan version of the skull.


So approaching the end of this revision of my Albertosaurine model. Hopefully this week my RAM upgrade will be showing up, and I can resume trying to learn to Vertex and Displacement modelling.


Any thoughts?

2 comments:

Albertonykus said...

Theropod lips certainly look strange to me, but at this point I'm can go either way with them.

Weapon of Mass Imagination said...

Yeah they are not the norm, but I'm starting to like it. The anatomical evidence they had them is somewhat strong.

Dr. Currie was pretty convinced they had them too, which counts for a lot in my books. He put a lot of the blame for exposed teeth on early palaeo-artists referencing crocodiles, who by spending most of their time in the water keep teeth nice and moist. Thus keeping their teeth from getting damaged from drying out.

It'd be interesting to look into all the extinct terrestial crocs to see if they had lips too.

If you look closely at most theropod skulls they have the same type of groove above the teeth roots that Monitor Lizards have, and the Monitors have lips (which are anchored to and supported by this groove). (Ahhh the payoff of intensive Mosasaur research :P)