The Beaked Blasle
The Beaked Blasle is a truly bizarre yet fascinating creature, living up in the forest highland, its toed hooves, strangely nmble and precise, are perfectly designed for digging through the dense forest floor in search of the juiciest, most nutrient-packed bugs you’ve never heard of. But this strange creatures main food source comes from it's robust hardened beak, which can crack through the toughest seeds and tear through hardened berries with ease.
As the seasons change in the highlands, the Blasle undergoes a transformation, growing a dense winter coat to protect from the harsh winters. Its horns, curved and twisted, serve as tool perfect for headbutting any predators or competitors that dare approach. The Blasle's oversized, directional ears can rotate almost 360 degrees, picking up the tiniest rustle in the underbrush.
The goal of this project was to become more familiar with the process of sculpting, retologizing, and baking maps to optimize a model. I also wanted to focus on environment building through procedural generation and utilizing and playing with Blenders new hair system. Click the information icon for more documentation.
The Feathered Skink
The Feathered Skink is quite large compared to it's Skink relatives. Living under the ferns of the lower highlands, the Feather Skink does the opposite of hiding. It's vibrant and bright colors warn predators of it's highly lethal venom. It's moving tendrils are used to lure and confuse it's pray. Although the Feathered Skink prefers grubs, it will eat just about anything it can fit it's rather large mouth
When faced with danger, the Feathered Skink will poof out it's feathers and tendrils to appear twice the size. The feathers also act as a form of interspecies communication. These reptiles have often been observed waving and flapping their feathers to attract mates
By taking what I learned in the last project, the goal here was to further optimize the asset. I first sculpted the asset and retopologized by hand with UV unwrapping in mind. I found unwrapping to be rather difficult when using remesh functions. With more knowledge, I was able to have more successful normal bakes and deformations with my rig. I also wanted to explore materials a bit more, especially subsurface scattering. Click the information icon for more documentation.