Design and Adaptations
I absolutely adore seeing creature designs in fiction. Some of my favourite games are centred around creature design, Subnautica as a great example, so this assignment was really exciting to me.
Starting off in this assignment, a few friends and I went straight to the library to check out some books. I was lucky enough to find a copy of “The Fundamentals of Creature Design” and in my own time I found a copy of “The Science of Creature Design” and my partner gave me a copy of his “After Man”, a book on speculative evolution post-humanity.
Initially reading these books left me wanting to do something a little more out there, as I felt like a lot of designs I was seeing especially online were just two creatures spliced together, and I had a few things in mind. When I drew them out however, I struggled to find something I would have liked to actually 3D model. I quickly learned that the reason why so many designs looked like a mix of animals that currently exist is because there is such a diversity of creatures on Earth that making something completely original is almost impossible, and the animals that do exist are so well adapted to every environment you could think of that it’s hard not to emulate such well adapted designs in another that is trying to be adapted to the same environment. Convincing creature designs add to the feel of a world, makes it more alive and believable, an empty world with no life just isn’t as interesting. I wanted to make an animal that wouldn’t necessarily be a massive focus of a setting, but one that felt realistic and at home in its world.
I went through many initial trial concepts, not really landing on anything solid.
After playing around with some designs, I had the idea of a mammal that digs little dens in the sides of mountains and uses its tail to bar the door. Taking inspiration from door head ants, and Phragmosis, which is when an animal hides itself in a burrow and uses its own body as a barrier. Then, since the creature would need to dig, I looked into the features of burrowing animals, like their claw shape and eyes. I gave my creature long front claws for digging, small sensory offshoots on its snout for better special awareness when digging, and no external ears so that they wouldn’t catch on dirt or rocks. The creature’s tail would be hard cartilage that mimicked the appearance of a boulder to help camouflage the entrance to its den, and I gave it very strong back legs to help defend against anything that did manage to get past the tail door, as it would be coming from behind, and so I wanted it to be able to defend better from that direction. However, I didn’t want this creature to be solely subterranean, which is what a lot of the adaptations I was reading about were suited for.
In my mind, this creature would look for food outside during the day, searching for fruit, soft edible plants in its surrounding environment, and digging for insects for protein. I gave it a large nose to smell out food and bugs, a long tongue to slurp up insects and as it was going to be in the outside world, I added heavy plating to its back to defend against attacks from predators and others of its own kind. The big boulder on its tail got me thinking about ankylosaurus and how they would use their tails as a weapon, so I imagine territorial disputes with others of its kind would be fought this way too, which cemented the need for protective plating in my mind. I also added spikes to the tail for extra damage for when the creature did have to defend itself.
To actually implement these things visually, I looked at real life examples of them. I used armadillos, ankylosaurs, moles, dogs, pangolins and examples of insectivorous mammals’ teeth to draw up my concept sketch.
I can imagine there would be a few variations of this creature in different environments, and their colours would mimic the rock and earth colours of their biome. For my model I did a desert variant, with sandy colours to help it blend in and be less detectable to danger.
Final Design!
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