This is my first attempt at creating an organic thing. I have been using blender for about a month. Looking forward to comments and suggestions.
Nice. If I was you I would make the eyelids/eyesockets more defined.
Do you have reference pictures? I’d advise you to use them. It takes years of practice before you can do organic modeling (accurate organic modeling) without any references.
Other than that, I’ve always loved big nasty carnivores 
Thanks for the comments. I worked on the eye socket some and the general skull shape. I am using a reference drawing, but there are no single drawings that show all the detail I need from front and side. So I drew my own head and arms/legs, my drawing abilities are merely fair. I also improved the arms so that they are integrated into the mesh (I’m getting better at that).
If you can’t find detailed references of the thing you’d like to model, it’s best to seek references from a thing which comes as close as possible to what you need to model. So try to find some refs of another big, nasty predator’s limbs and head 
Thanks, no spinosaurus there, but I did find this one: http://www.bhigr.com/store/product.php?productid=334#detailed
It took me about 5 tries but I am finally happy with my spinosaurus eyes. Getting the eyes right also makes the skull look more skull-like, cool.
My 8 yr old (who has seen every Discovery channel dinosaur special ever made) suggested a muscle bulge in the lower jaw. There is some suspicion that Spine. was a fish-eater. Hence also the longer, flamingo like jaw, compared to the more square T-rex jaw. The teeth look a little funny because I have not yet applied the mirror, but the teeth are not symmetrical so I will adjust that when I apply the mirror.
I realize the head is still not quite right but I’d like to play around with some animation for a while. I’d also like to hear from other paleophiles who have tried to model dinosaurs.
His name is Sam (the Spinosaurus, not my son
btw Blender is pretty cool. I am a man obsessed.
Here is where I’m at:
Sam now has bones and he can walk. I am almost happy with the leg rigging, but not quite sure what to do with the body, seems like he needs some other movement.
Any idea how to get him to walk in anything other than a straight line? I’m not sure how to get him to turn. I can make move the ik_solvers of the foot bones, but that doesn’t change the angle of the whole body.
Also when I have the ik solvers on the jaw bones (which he needs to eat I don’t know how to turn the head w/o distorting the head. I think I need to somehow lock the size of the jaw bones and make them not stretch.
Happy for any suggestions. I have done many rigging tutorials, although they haven’t all worked for me, probably because blender UI is now slightly different (also I can’t follow directions
>>> Just noticed this, what’s with the colors? I’m using clouds texture for the skin, it looks as if its flowing through him as he moves.
Here is a link (880K)
http://www.meet-the-newmans.org/ray/0035_0180.avi
You did use Window UV coordinates and not Local UV coordinates… He looks like walking through a projector beam
EDIT: BTW… you need reference images? Hope this helps:
http://www.piinc.biz/images/dino/Dino%20pics/spinosaurus.jpg
Right, somehow the Global button got pressed in the map-to textures tab, I mapped it back to Ortho and that fixed it. Eventually I need to UV paint every cell to get the scales to look like that. But for now I am trying to find a reasonable texture to apply to the whole body.
Those are awesome links, when I retouch the head I will use them as a reference.
Armature-wise, what I like to do is have a root bone to which most other bones are parented. That way I can move and turn the root bone, and the whole model moves and turns. I leave the feet/leg control bones parent-free so that they don’t move with the root bone, that way they can stay in place and only move when I want them to. There’s probably a better way, but that’s how I do it. Here’s an example blend file:
http://paxbradley.com/misc/lizard_arm.blend
and a quick animation of it walking:
http://paxbradley.com/misc/liz_test.avi
The rig in the blend file is incomplete, because I just wanted to see how I would make a horizontal character walk. All of my other characters have been verical creatures (head on top of hips on top of feet). I had never done a character that was horizontal (head to the side of hips to the side of tail, with feet under the hips).
[edit]
Oh, yeah… I made it in a CVS version of blender and don’t have a copy of 2.42a on the machine I’m using right now. I hope the blend file works for you. Let me know if it doesn’t and I’ll get it working when i get home.
It does work. I’ll play around with it, I like that it only uses a few bones. I have about 20 bones, but some of them only connect other bones. I have one root (the neck) and ik solvers for the tail, fingers, jaws, and 2 for each foot. With ik solvers on each end it is virtually impossible to rotate the body by just moving the bones.
I found it wasn’t so hard to rotate/move the whole body as an object as an IPO action, and then fix the foot in each frame so it doesn’t bounce around too much. Here is what I got:
Well, to be honest, my rig has over 20 bones… they’re just hidden on the second armature level. I like to separate my deform bones from the bones that control them, and then display only the control bones. It makes it a lot easier to animate, in my opinion. But then, I’m still learning too.
That’s really nice.
It would look better with some bump mapping and organic modelling in sharp construct. If you’ve not used sharp construct you’ve really go to try it.
http://sharp3d.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page
http://carcaryas.free.fr/making1english.htm
Once you’ve done that a bit of fake sub surface scattering will round things up nicely.
I see. All the ik solvers are children of the root node, except for the feet, which use floor constraint. I like that because you can rotate the root bone and the body rotates like a rigid body. Let me rig mine up like that and try it…for some reason I thought that the ik solvers can’t also be children.
the front legs don’t look right…aren’t they supposed to bend the other way? does it only use the back legs to walk?
cool though, and the textures are nice.
Now I have worked those concepts into the animation and it looks much better. I have 3non-parented bones, one parent bone and one for each foot. Much easier, only 3 things to place in each pose. I got a pretty good slash and roar.
http://www.meet-the-newmans.org/ray/0001_0255.avi
Now I am going to work on the actual dinosaur and the texture 
He tip-toes like hell, otherwise ok for the start. This animal had a considerable weight so walking should give the impression of the legs having to sustain that weight ( when it comes down ). this way it looks like a prima ballerina tip-toeing across the stage and not like a dinosaur
Decided to take a step back and work on the mesh some more. I hand-drew profile and front views from the references provided here, and worked some on mastering this texture-painting thing (and Gimp). Now to see if I can make this latch onto the body.
