Hi! Here is my latest project. A life reconstruction of the oviraptorid dinosaurs Khaan mckennai from the Djadochta formation, late Cretaceous, about 75 million years ago.
I wanted to combine my understanding of the recent scientific findings with art and a bit of storytelling, so the renders here are all themed around the courtship/brooding/hatching topic.
The models themselves are based around a reconstruction of the skeleton based on the osteology paper of Balanoff, Norell; 2012, with some gaps being filled from other oviraptorids. A coarse flesh model is sculpted on top.
For the feathers, I modelled different types loosely based on fossils of relatives, as no feathers have been found for Khaan. Diffuse, alpha and normal maps were generated from these high-res models, and used for texturing feather cards - a total of almost 90 different ones:
Wow, it’s absolutely fantastic! I admire the thoroughness and care that must have gone into this. It really pays off. The little hatchling is very cute.
Yes, wow alright! Beautiful work! I started off in the Biology business so I really love what people can do with Blender in this area! Now if I can just get some Radical Life Extension going I would have time to learn how to do this stuff too!
Hey Thorsten, this is really breathtaking. I can’t even imagine how long you must have worked on this. It is so good. It creates such a strong feeling of this creatures being once alive. Unbelievable what you can do with Blender!
Stunning! As sidp said, the amount of precision and work is admirable.
Do you know of any resources about making and adding feathers on the model as you did? I would love to learn, but haven’t found any good explanations of it previously.
Not really - I have watched quite a few tutorials on YouTube and in the end took only a few base elements from them. The heavy lifting here was done by the new curve and geo nodes based hair system and some custom made geo node setups. Maybe I can do a short tutorial how I did it. But it’s still far from perfect…
