The last few days I have been polishing up the sculpt more and putting together a main rig and did all the weight painting for it to test out deformations with the mesh and it is working well. The rig is mostly FK with IK arms and legs. There will eventually be more controls such as eyes/eyelids, nose, “growl” controls, nictitating membrane, breathing controls, probably some corrective shape keys and hopefully some kind of muscle simulation, either with shape keys or some other method.
Hi, Great work with the raptor. I would like to ask some queries.
While modeling, we are posing the mouth slightly open right. How will you get the details of the muscle in upper and lower jaw joints when roaring?. The texture is stretching as well as the mesh.
Are you sculpting additional details for the wrinkles after binding the skin? if yes, will it not create any problem?
With the mesh being unmodified by the armature, the mouth is actually closed shut. I modeled it closed so that the upper and lower jaw align with each other properly. Before the armature was applied to the mesh and weight painted, I was just rotating the jaw a specific degrees around a specific vertex to open or close it when sculpting.
Yes, but when I continue sculpting wrinkles/details, it will be done in the default/unmodified pose (as seen above.) As far as I’m aware, there shouldn’t be any issues doing it this way as it’s being done in multiresolution (keeping the same geometry)
It’s been a while since my last update as I’ve been busy with other things, but I recently returned to the project again for the last few days. I have modeled a set of teeth, a tongue and sculpted the gums/mouth. I’m also trying out substance painter in different ways, mostly just experimenting with the features as I’ve never used it before.
I threw together some quick test textures with procedural scales combined with manually-sculpted scales on the head and I’m liking the result so far, although there is plenty of room for improvement when I get to the final texturing process. Mostly just playing around with it right now and learning my way around the program.
I’m going to do another layer of sculpting for fine skin details before I get to the texturing and I still need to finish sculpting + unwrapping the teeth, claws and tongue. The eyes are just placeholder spheres for now, I will eventually make proper eyes using shaders with pupil dilation controls and whatnot. Lots more to do after that too with the rig and other things.
The last few days I’ve just been working more on the multires sculpt. Bringing out certain details more, refining other areas etc. Also did another quick texturing exercise in Substance Painter.
I haven’t yet decided if I want to do the larger scales on hands/feet as part of the sculpt or separate objects yet so I have been avoiding that for now. I’m also going to give Quixel Mixer a try tonight and see how that goes. Still new to the whole procedural texturing thing.
Today I duplicated the head and got started preparing the final scale layout for the head using a mask. The plan is to get the scale layout done and leave it as a mask to then apply later to the full-body model using shrinkwrap. Here’s what it looks like right now if it were brought out using a layer brush:
I’ve tried to not keep them too uniform/same-y by making them different shapes and sizes and flowing in different directions. After these scales are applied to the final model, I’ll further sculpt on top of them to make each scale unique rather than just flat and there will also be macro detail on top using the normal map that I’ll make in Substance Painter. The goal is to have enough detail for very tight shots on the head. Pretty happy with the layout so far. Will be continuing with this (tedious) process for the next few days.
I’ll also likely be doing the same method for the scales that line the hands and feet.
Head scale layout done! The scales underneath the jaw will likely be done in Substance, or just added later to the scale mask. But I’m pretty happy with how the layout looks for now.
This all looks very good indeed. It may even trigger me to get back to an old project of mine, started in Blender 2.49b originally, that is sitting untouched for years on my hard disk.
