When I was given this assignment the first ideas I had was to draw a flying jungle creature that could disguise itself as a large piece of fruit which would enable it to lure in unsuspecting prey, such as small monkeys and lemurs to satisfy its hunger. I then looked at another idea which was a water buffalo. This animal would be able to grow lily pads on its back as a form of camouflage to allow it to hide in plane sight of its predators, as it mainly lived in shallow swamp water, grazing on algae and other such plant life.
My third idea was a shark like creature who’s body would evolve to looked like sea grass and used ambush tactics much like the jungle creature to capture it prey.However, after speaking to my lecturer the feedback he gave me was that the design was very simple and lacked detail. I then decided to change my design, but I wanted to stick with something that lived under the sea. At the time of designing my finial piece of work I was listening to a recording of a video essay on the whaling ship that inspired the book Moby Dick and took some inspiration from the large whale. This led me into looking at the prehistoric whale Livyatan which was an ancient relative of the sperm whale. This species of whale has been estimated to grow too lengths of roughly between 44 to 57 feet long which I wanted to try and capture in my model.
My character is a carnivore that lives in the open sea and primarily in the ”Twilight zone” 1000m down, it hunts things such as giant squid much like a sperm whale it is much more slow moving than the whale to conserve energy and to seem non threatening in order to get as close as possible before striking it prey. I took a lot of inspiration from the creatures from both subnautica games. I also looked at some of the creatures that live in the Twilight zone which my creature was going to live in such as the gulper eel and anglerfish, a majority of animal life that deep down in the ocean have either dark or transparent skin with bioluminescence.
When it came to actually modelling and sculpting the creature I decided to change a few things from the sketch below, such as the toe like parts of the fins and the tendrils on the tail fin as I thought that they would make the retopology too complex. This would make it extremely hard to UV as I already struggle at times in those areas of 3D. I wanted the creature to fit into the deep sea and to be unable to go up to the surface of the water and be unable to go onto land as its body would be too heavy for its fins to support its weight. If I had not changed the toe like parts on the fins it would have made it look like it could have dragged itself onto land. Unfortunately if it had tried to go onto land it could not have survived. I really enjoyed sculpting in Blender, at times it felt like I was modelling with clay although I did find it difficult in areas as things became pixelated and harder to add any detail. When working on my UVs I struggled on where to put seams for a while. After speaking to one of my lecturer about this he showed me where I was going wrong and what areas I should add them too. I then began to add a seam around the neck of the creature along with seams running up the tendrils and down the fins, after doing this it unwrapped almost perfectly. Which I was very pleased about as I felt I would never get it right. Much like with the 3D assignment I had to complete last year things took me a lot longer than I initially expected. This caused me some anxiety, but when I took a step back I was able to settle myself and continue with my assignment. The majority of my issues came from retopology and UVs.
I had a number of issues when it came to retopology and UVing my model. One of my issues was I had loose geometry where some of my model would leave holes/gapes when I was trying to unwrap the UV map. Also some of my retopology had 5 vertices which made the UV and model break in areas. I spoke to my tutor and they explained to me that I should only have either 3 / 4 vertices and not 5. I also struggled when it came to Adobe substance painter. When I was using the Adobe substance painter my model was see through and this should not have been the case. Again after speaking to my tutor we discovered that I had exported my model with out turning off the transparency setting. It took a few weeks for me to get the product key for substance painter as Adobe did not respond to my request for a few weeks, then when I imported the .fbx file to begin texturing I realised that there was a few other areas I needed to fix that I did not see initially. There was a few small gaps with in my model that I had overlooked. Once I fixed those areas and imported the .fbx file I was then able to begin texturing my model. The only other issues I had was at times the programme would crash. This caused me to lose the piece I was working on. Which in turn caused my anxiety levels to rise.
Originally I was going to use a leather texture to make it look like this creature had small scales all over its body, mainly dark blue with lighter areas on the head tendrils. I liked this texture, however when looking through the list of choices I found a texture I liked more called “monster skin”. I believed that this texture looked more like a skin of a real creature. I added a few different modifiers such as a few layers of the dirt texture. This would give more texture to its skin and with the light blue dots along its body and head would make it look more alive.
When I tried to make a brush to add some skin details onto my creature I had a lot of issues. I watched multiple tutorials to enable me to make a brush however, nothing I did or followed seemed to work for me. After trying a number of times I decided that I had to stop trying to get the brush to work. As I was getting behind and would not have gotten my model finished in time. I felt I had spent too long on just trying to sort the brush out and I was already behind on my model. I know not having the brush will affect my marks but I think my model looks good without the skin details I was thinking of adding.
I really struggled when it came to unreal engine. I had never used this program before and it was quite complex, as there was a lot of menus and sub menus to choose from. It was frustrating at first as I could not seem to wrap my head around all of the controls and buttons. Thankfully after watching a few tutorials I managed to create a small underwater scene using rocks and some seaweed. The scene in which my creature lives is mostly devoid of life. This is because the zone they live in, life is quite sparce, because of the depth of the ocean where my creature lives. When it came to lighting the scene and putting light onto my creature I looked at a lot of images of deep sea exploration. I saw that there was usually only one light on the subject for instance a ship wreck or creature, would be lite up . There was little to no light on the environment as the background would be pitch black. This is because light cannot travel far when you are so deep in the ocean. I made the light a shade of dark blue. As in a majority of images I looked at the light was either blue, green or a harsh yellow. I tested out each of these colours and I felt that the blue looked the best out of them all. I also tried different lighting positions and intensities. I really enjoyed playing around with lighting in “unreal engine,” even if it got frustratingly slow at points because of how heavy the program can be. It was a lot of trial and error when it came to creating the environment, as well as the first seaweed objects I used because it had a box around them that only vanished if I zoomed in close to them. I decided to switch the seaweed out for a different one which did not have a box around it and it looked so much better.I am glad I switched it out as I am a lot happier with the results.
I am very happy with the way the final image has turned out. I feel that the background and model work really well together. I believe I captured what I set out to do for my assignment. If anything I could have added a little more detail in both the model and the environment, such as more defined bioluminescence on the creature along with a mouth and possibly a few tiny glowing dots floating around in the water. This is a very large and also very slow moving creature that lives in the deep.