Christoph Haider - Creature Projects

Reggie - rigged sci-fi creature

The model without the background and post editing.

Transitions between AO, textured and wireframe

On the left you can see the custom controlrig I created on top of the generated one (the middle). The idea was to simplify the positioning of the character for different poses while maintaining the ability to finetune the final poses using the underlying controlrig. On the right image you can see the skeletal rig used.

Finally, the reference board I used for this project. The drawing in the middel was my main inspiration with additional ideas and references for different parts. I also tried to lock down a color scheme rather early in the whole project so there are also a few color palettes on there.

I had a real blast creating this project. Especially the sculpting stage in the beginning was very interesting for me. really getting in there and sculpting out all the little details was a fun thing to do. It also was an interesting experience working with the advancedSkeleton5 plugin for the first time and using it to create a control rig.

Red Wyvern - rigged fantasy creature

This is a red wyvern I created off of a concept provided by CGSpectrum. The whole creature has 44k Quads total and the Textures are taking up 4 UDIMs.

The whole process was done by myself. I started with a sculpt in ZBrush and blocked the scales out in Maya. After retopologizing and preparing everything I headed over to SubstancePainter to texture everything. I created the rig and the control rig both by hand. I also created a few addtional attributes for the wings, talons and mouth.

Last but not least I rendered it using Arnold and did the post edits using Photoshop.

Model without any post edits.

Above you can see a transition between AO, FullTex and Wireframe render of the Wyvern. I also added two screenshots schowing the control rig as well as the skeletal rig of the creature.

I really enjoyed this project and learned a lot while creating it. Especially rigging the wings was a challenge, but I managed to get some decent results using blendshapes and custom attributes.

And that's it! I do hope you enjoyed my work and the breakdown of my workflows. Thank you for checking out my submission, and I do hope you have a great day!