Skeleton Warrior

Skeleton Warrior

I was inspired by Harryhausen’s work in Jason and the Argonauts, and wanted to make a skeleton warrior of my own using Blender 3D, and animate it in a stop-motion style. 

Here are a few shots of the result:

I started out box-modeling the individual bones using reference images I found online as well as a skull and skeleton model I purchased:

(Front, Left)

Continued to add additional bones, I think the arm and leg bones were some of the easier to model. I was mostly focused on getting the general shape. 

Rough work on hips and spine. The hip bones were particularly mind-bending. I ended up using a plane to start the shape, instead of a cube, and was able to work out the shapes that bend in on themselves.

Reworked the spine, and continued to adjust proportions. Started the skull. 

Here is the final “rough” model.  All bones are in place, but I will continue to make small adjustments throughout the process. 

First pass at shading, trying to get a rough bone texture that has perhaps seen better days. 

This is the mesh before I started rigging. I used the Rigify add-on for Blender to do most of the rigging work, and just made a few adjustments to get it to bend without much deformation. I noticed at this point that the hip socket was missing. That was bugging me, so I fixed that, too. 

The texturing is based on noise and procedural textures combined together. I used ambient occlusion to get the wear around the edges.

There are some things I’d like to improve at some point. The skull topology could use some work, and some of the small finger/toe bones could be improved. This is one of the larger projects I’ve worked on, and overall I’m happy with how it turned out.