Here’s a new project I’ve been working on for the past two days : meet the Pedalternorotandomovens ! It appears on two of MC Escher’s drawings. I liked the little fella and thought I could make a revised version in Blender, maybe even animate it (although I haven’t done any rigging or animating yet…).
Comments and constructive crits are welcome. I need a little advice on the texture… I don’t really know which color I should give him. I was thinking maybe green… suggestions regarding the modelling or the rigging are also quite welcome ! I’m quite new to Blender and have only been using it for 2 months, so bear with me
On the pic you can also see Escher’s original version. I made less human leg, added little spikes and two holes for the nose.
That would be awesome if you animated it. Escher is one of my favorite artists, and I remember that drawing well. It rolls up into a ball, and then back to the form that you have it in now. I like it so-far.
That’s a short name! Just watch the boxiness its not quite that boxy in the image. Can’t wait to see how you attempt to do the blending into a 2d image. That stuff is mind boggling!
sorry for the late update… I’ve been very busy lately.
Unfortunately, there’s not that much to see I have to admit. I did a little tweaking on the legs and the tail and made his body look a bit more curly. Now the next step is rigging… I’ve been trying to figure out how exactly I should do this, but have failed miserably as of now !
Could someone please help me figure out how the hell I should rig this guy ! I have read a couple of tutorials on rigging (hand rigging, spider rigging…), to try and understand how the parenting and the constraints affect the skeleton but it never does what I expect it to !
I would like him to be able to roll up in a ball, the way Escher made him… as well as other basic poses of course. take a look at what I’ve done so far and tell me if maybe I should use less bones. I don’t know.
I’d be happy to post the wires but I don’t really know how to do it. I mean I know, but I don’t know how to make the wires look like the ones I’ve seen… it’s subsurfed (lots of wires) and I don’t know if it’ll come out that good without it…
Alright ! Here’s one more update ! I finally had some time to finish up the armature and put him in the pose I wanted. Also did some more tweaking here and there, finally found the camera angle I wanted to use… and finished the lighting (jeez that’s long !!) ! Render was made with Yafray and the DoF was done in post prod, I just wanted to see what it would look like in the end.
I know the texture is no good, but I’d like some advice on that… so C&C’s most welcome ! I don’t really know what kind of color/texture I want.
I also put the wires, as someone was curious to see them.
I recommend not using masked gaussian blur like you most likely did though. It results in something like moisty glass. For GIMP I recommend focal blur or just use the new blender blur in the compositor.
As far as the depth of field effect in the latest render–it looks like you did a Gaussian Blur with the mode set to Darken. You really shouldn’t use Darken for this; it’ll retain more detail, yes, but it doesn’t look like the blur in a real photo. As jimmac said, it looks kind of like moist glass. For best results, just use Gaussian Blur as-is.
Just a little thing, though. Keep up the great work!
snelleeddy : I thought the human legs looked a bit odd… my creature is an evolution I guess, I didn’t want to make a carbon copy of Escher’s. And thanks for the compliment
jimmac & Datameister : thanks for the crit, I’ll work on the DoF. It was just a try anyway (took me less than a minute to do…). I had a look at a tutorial on DoF in blender, but I didn’t understand everything, I have to admit. I haven’t done any compositing in blender yet and have no clue what CVS is. I’ll probably give it a try sometime though.
anoncompboy : I have opengl activated yes, why ?
I’d like to focus on the texture for now. Ideas anyone ? Should he have a lizard like texture ? or more like an armadillo ? Should he be yellow / orange ? or green ? I’ve done a couple of tries but nothing seems to work.
I’ve also tried displacement on one texture but it really looks horrible ! The displacement is way too much even when I reduce the value… I must be missing something…
Good job, GTR! I’m not very familiar with MC Escher’s work, but this little lizard is extremely cute!
Ah, I just learned about the answer to the displacement problem yesterday!
What you need to do is reduce the Nor slider to 0 in the channel that uses Disp. You have to do that even if you are not using Nor in that channel.
I think he should be green/orange, and textured more like an armadillo.
I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the result so I decided to start all over ! I kept the head though (which I tweaked). This time I want to have a clean mesh and a better rig. Last time I wasn’t able to have him do what I want. So here’s another try !
What is also different this time is that I’m taking a lot more freedom from the original one ! I’d like to make him a stand-up character who could also go back into his original pose and maybe even curl like the real one !
What do you think ? Better or not ? Doable ?
I’m also wondering wether I should give him 4 legs… or stick to 6 like the “real” one.
I would say you should do 6 legs that way you could have some fun with it like have four legs walking with the more handish looking ones up front with a cain… or you could have him do something with 4 hands and walk with 2 legs. Or a combination of both? i guess theres alot more to choose from but its your project.
