Ornivore

Ornivore

Getting started

I've started my Student Reel with a cute little creature I found on Artstation. The artist of the concept is Panagiotis Cheliotis.

Although I am specializing on Rigging, I wanted my very first project to be one I started and planned on my own. While learning more about the pipeline in general and the influence every department has on Rigging and vice versa, I also managed to prevent future problems.

Besides, I really liked to dive into Sculpting and Texturing a little more, since I had lots of fun in the classes before.

Sculpting

Integration

After Sculpting I thought about the environment I wanted for my creature.

I planned to capture the mysterious, creepy and greenish atmosphere of the concept, but didn't want to copy the skulls. I teamed up with Mirco Tornow to create an integration using footage of the woods near my home.

We went to shoot the footage and an HDRI for the right lighting and reflection.

Rigging

After retopologizing and creating the UV's, I started to rig the creature.

It was my first non-human rig, so it was pretty challenging in the beginning but I learned a lot of new things e.g. rigging a hind leg, ribbon spines and anatomy.

Below you can see a demonstration of the finished rig I sent to Joshua Schmidt for animation.

Texturing

While he animated it, I created the textures in Mari. The only thing I ever textured in Mari before was a spoon, so I had to do some research about creating skin textures.

The grooming was done by Franziska Niebuhr.

Here are some texturing WiP's and the plugged-in textures. I rendered everything using Redshift.

Here you can see the finished Integration.

Turntable

For the breakdowns, I also wanted to do a turntable. Elia Göttlicher was responsible for the Lighting and Compositing and we had the nice idea to do an animated, loopable turntable, to not only present the texturing breakdown, but also the rig.

I sent the rig over to Nina Fischer for the animation. Since she had already graduated, we did reviews on syncsketch.

I am really happy how it all turned out!