In an effort to get back into Blender I loaded up an old file that was just the beginnings of some type of boar nose and went from there. I stepped away from the mesh modeling a bit as well to muck around with some of the new particles and I must say the results are infinitely better than what I could normally accomplish. Still much to do before it can be called remotely finished.
Couple of things for the short term would be to finish the limbs, add in more muscle definition, and get rid of the “lips” and replace them with jowls.
Looks good overall, except those flap on top of the nose are really distracting, and they serve no purpose, as far as I can tell.
The overall shape and concept looks great, I can’t wait to see this texture. But the main problem I see is the edge loops. They don’t flow the way they should, and you’ve got lots of poles in there, especially in the legs. Those will really be troublesome while animating.
The flaps were more than anything to make it a little different than other creatures, but if it realy is too distracting then it’ll have to go. As far as textures go, that may be a while in the making as I royally suck at it. But if I were able to project my abstract visualization of it, I’d say a slightly leathery, scaly feel.
As for the poles, I knew someone would take note of them. Unfortunately I don’t really have enough understanding of the fineries of edge looping to effectively eliminate them while still retaining muscle definition. Time to go searching for more tutorials.
Is there a patch for the new particles, do you have to overwrite the old blender program, or do you make a new file for the blender version with particles?
That’s where you can find the latest SVN. (What that means to me is Snazzy New Version with no order to the acronyms.) I run on a Mac, so I don’t really know how to install for other operating systems, but yes that is where the latest particle builds are.
Alright, some more work done since the last post. I’ve got the basic layout of the feet down. While they will certainly need even more tweaking and mucking about with to get that grizzled feel, I’m rather content with the theme of them if nothing else.
I ran into a problem with copying the feet from the front legs to the back in that the back leg edge loops have an odd number of vertices and the foot only has even numbered edge loops. So I’ll either have to redo the leg, build the back foot from scratch, or make another edgeloop spanning up the leg and ending on the back. I’m leaning toward redoing the leg so it has even numbered edge loop vertices to try and remain consistent throughout the model as much as is comfortably possible.
Alright, the mesh is all but complete with a backup just in case something bugs me too much. Here is a test pose along with some hair testing as well. I’d have a better, more fur covered one, but I inadvertently did something which repels the particles from the comb brush rather than go with it. Horray for that.
I was thinking the creature might be blind or at the very least very sensitive to sunlight like a sheepdog and navigate primarily by smell, hence justifying the comical looking nose, but I see what you mean. Hm… maybe textures would help them pop a bit.
