Hey… so I dig dinos too and thought I’d do the competition thing, even though it doesn’t seem many people are doing it. It also gives me a reason to do a bigger project in Blender in my free time.
My idea is this… I will model a couple dinos, record live action in the woods behind my apartment, and then composite all together for a cool shot. That’s the plan anyway.
Here’s the first dino: I’m going with a Jurassic Park 3 style raptor. I may duplicate it and have two attacking something or just messing about in the woods.
My problem is sculpting. My laptop is already having a problem with almost 200k polys. Any advice on how to speed it up will make me happy. Below is a screenshot of my dino and comp specs.
Acer Aspire 7551
AMD Phenom II X4 N970
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250
4GB RAM
I’m going by what it says at the top: Faces 193,194
I’m also not used to multires modifier so I have no clue. Like I said, I don’t normally use Blender for sculpting, so this is my first go about it on a full project.
I think using GLSL shading with a shadeless material and a matcap texture is actually faster than the default shading. It might depend on your video card.
Really? I thought I heard the other way around. I read somewhere or something that you shouldn’t use a matcap to sculpt if you wanted better performance. I could always try it.
Thanks to Alek’s tip on turning on fast sculpt, it’s easier to sculpt now. I’m playing with wrinkles now in the skin on certain parts before i continue across the whole model. Then I’ll move onto scales and what not. Just trying to figure it all out right now.
What do you mean? This is all Blender. When in sculpt mode, I just press H and hide parts of the mesh I don’t want. It helps sculpting much easier in Blender. Unless you’re talking about something else.
Not sure what feature you’re talking about. I’m pretty happy with the hide feature inside Blender already. Here’s an update of the raptor. No scales yet… still working on the underlying muscle and skin folds here and there.
Ciao. Thanks. I plan to do the scales by using alpha maps and sculpting over them. I was going to sculpt them all and not use alphas, but I don’t think I can get the resolution needed on my com to do that. We’ll see. I’ll try a go at it this evening.
Hey, thanks guys. I appreciate the comments. It helps keep me moving forward.
@ChrisSkinner - I checked out your site. I dig the mograph stuff and other things you got on there. Nice work, man.
Ok, I decided against using alphas. It’s overdone, and it doesn’t help sell the model well. Besides, I’m pushing Blender’s sculpting tools to the limit here. I’ve started sculpting in the skin, scales and such now. No alphas. No way. Keep in mind this is just roughing it all in. It’s not close to done yet.
