It’s been merely three months since I pivoted from doing digital drawings to a hyper-focused, almost daily tinkering with 3D modeling in Blender 3.6.22, mostly doing esoteric art through scenes revolving around a CharMorph humanoid model (meant to represent, and literally named after, Lilith) who I modified heavily by fine-tuning the materials (especially the eyes, to make them simulate a tapetum lucidum) and adding assets I sculpted myself, such as dress and rigged wings.
This owl, meant as both Lilith’s companion and zoomorphic manifestation, is my first successful sculpting of an entire new character, as well as my first successful rigging that didn’t rely on libraries except for Rigify, and my first post to this community (I usually post my artworks on Fediverse/Lemmy communities, it’s my first time posting my artwork outside the Fediverse).
As a trivia regarding the creation of this owl, I started with the idea of sculpting a Great Horned Eagle-Owl (Bubo virginianus), but I ended up pivoting to a Megascops (screech-owls, specifically, this one who was one of my main visual inspirations). This specific genus felt somewhat easier for me to sculpt than eagle-owls, also better fitting the symbolism purposefully imbued into my art (with Lilith’s name sometimes translated as “screech-owl”). (You’ll see me referring to the owl as “her”, it’s both because I’m Brazilian and coruja, Portuguese word for owl, is a feminine-gendered noun, and also because owls, especially this one, is symbolically intertwined with Lilith).
Regarding this specific scene, only the skeleton, the Moon texture and the sky texture aren’t mine: the skeleton is a Public Domain model (“Simple Rigged Skeleton”), while the Moon texture and sky texture are resources from NASA SVS projected onto literally huge spheres (the latter encompassing the entire scene). The text (“Vita mori oportet.”, which is a Memento Mori phrase) is literally carved to the headstone using a Displace modifier to a highly-subdivided part of the cube comprising the headstone. The dirt texture is Simplex noise I generated through GIMP (I could have used Blender’s Noise Texture, but using a fixed image is somehow more performant on my potato laptop, especially when I’m forcing it to render a 2K scene). The grass is made of Hair particles, the ground is a plane subdivided with a fractal value set to something greater than zero. The original resolution for this animation is 2560x1440. I had to downscale the video to 720p because it exceeded the maximum upload size allowed by this community. I also added two still frames alongside the downscaled video, if the video doesn’t work for encoding reasons (at least I’m seeing a standard “Video” thumbnail instead of the actual embedded video while I’m composing this post).
I’m thinking of releasing this owl model freely, although I’m yet to choose a licensing for it (likely CC-BY-NC-SA because I don’t want to see this owl or derivatives being used for commercial purposes, but I heard it’s a complicated license for remixed works).
Because I saw other threads in this community depicting the elements “skeleton”, “cemetery/graveyard”, none of which had the tag NSFW, I’m posting this thread without marking it as sensitive like I’d usually do upon posting to the Fediverse. Please let me know if I should’ve marked this thread as NSFW.
As for the project/model and animation, suggestions are welcome!
Alt-text (for accessibility): short animation taking place during night time, in a graveyard containing several rows of headstones surrounded by a short grass. A brown screech-owl is perched atop one of the headstones from the middle of the first row. The gray headstones all have the same carved inscription: “Vita mori oportet”. A red, large crescent Moon, with the concave part facing upward, looms above the owl. A few stars are visible behind, with the same red tint. A skeleton is stretching on the grass, few meters away from the headstones. The animation begins with the camera very close to the skeleton’s skull before it starts moving through the grass, past the skeleton, slowly approaching the owl. As the camera approaches, the owl briefly unfurls her wings while looking up, closing her eyes and opening her beak as if she were screeching/hooting. Then she furls back her wings, develops a grumpy face and begins staring at the camera. When the camera is closer to her, she tilts her head slightly (a behavior typical of real owls), then briefly lifts her right talons (scene’s left side) towards the camera while slightly stretching her claws and blinking both eyes in a tender manner, then she suddenly straightens her posture while doing the same piercing gazing again as her eyes glow green (slightly exaggerated tapetum lucidum to convey an uncanny supernaturality).
