Another Feathered Dinosaur

Since I am hoping the Feathered Dinosaur "relaunch" gallery at ART Evolved will be a big event I want to go all out on my piece (possibly pieces). As of such I need some additional feathered Dinosaurs.

I don't have the time to model anything new (my Xmas break ends today :( ), so instead I've just added some feathers to my existing Gorgosaurus.

How do they look?

Scaling the Gorgosaurus

In between preparations for the big day I've managed to sneak in the odd bit of
work on my Gorgosaurus.

So here is the Mark 6 status on this fella. The latest improvement (besides adjustments of the lips and limb to digit connections) have been the incorporation of the feet and hand scales into the texture maps themselves. Before this I'd always just lined the fingers and toes with scale objects. While sort of achieving the effect to an extent, the objects always looked for forced and they never rigged well.

I think he is pretty the awesome.

He definitely has junk in the trunk!

Thoughts or input?

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?

A possible Pattern

While my efforts to define my 3D Dinosaurs style into a more realistic look have been all over the place, I think I've finally hit upon a winning look for my Gorgosaurus, which you can see above.

Thoughts or feedback (keeping in mind I have of course only textured the body and leg... the remainders of Lillian's texture will be reworked shortly).

The Works

While I may not seem the huge sports fan (and overall I'm not), certain competitions can really reel me in. Among those are the Olympics and the NHL playoffs. This year the Stanley Cup tournament is turning into quite nail biter as my current favourite the Vancouver Cauncks battle their way to close victories.

While watching the game I'm trying to multi task on 3D stuff. I'm having limited success. This is both in terms of my work level, and the product I'm producing.

My biggest frustration is the Parasaurolophus. While I'm happy with is proportions and build (really a carry over of the Corythosaur... though Parasaurolophus surprisingly has a WAY longer neck than other Lambeosaurines when I started looking at references...) the colouration of this beast is driving me up the wall.

In fact trying to get "realistic" looking shaders and colour schemes as a whole is starting to try my patience. While I'm sampling my colour palette from photographs of various natural things I have in my library (man I love being a shutter bug), getting them into agreeable patterns is not happening for me so far. The Corythosaur organically fell into place, where everything else (probably because I'm thinking about it too much) is just not happening.


To shake things up, I swapped over to fixing my Ceratopsians again, starting with Styracosaurus. Using references from Ryan's reclassification of Styraco I'm quite happy with the results.

I have to say I'm quite surprised with how flat Centrosaurine frills are compared to how curled most people tend to draw them. I might have to do a quite AE post about this...

So overall this guy is getting to be in prime shape for Mark 7 conversion (once the puter store gets in my RAM upgrade).

Again look how flat that frill is. I've had a certified Ceratopsian expert (doing his PHD on them) check it, and he agrees with it. So cool.

I think I'm off to a strong start with this Gorgosaurus shader, but it is not finished. There is debate about the brown bands along the back.

Any thoughts on any or all of these.