This is my blog post showing my progress, references, difficulties and opinion on the overall outcome of my piece during the making of my creature which is an alien angler fish. while thinking about what I wanted to do, I came up with a couple of different ideas, one of which was of Irish mythology a character called Dullahan, I believe this would have been a good idea as I could have went quite in depth with the design and it could have pushed my 3D skills,  another idea I had was a cyborg scorpion, I had actually already started the sculpt of the scorpion and created mechanical legs and rigged them in such a way that the mechanism physically made sense, I wanted to keep going with this project but I found myself not able to put much more into the body of the scorpion as I wanted to build an engine inside of the body but it didn’t seem feasible as most of it wouldn’t have been seen and I never knew the correct way to implement the engine inside of the body. When I was looking for references, I already had an image in my head of what I wanted my creature to be, so I gathered a lot of different references of angler fish and xenomorphs from alien, as these would have made the best references for my initial Idea so Instead of going for the previous two ideas I then decided to go with a concept that I have been wanting to model or quite a while, which is an alien angler fish that I then did a sketch of and really liked the outcome, I thought that this would have made an interesting 3D model as it was quite a unique concept. Whilst drawing the overall design of the alien angler fish I included different parts of my references one of which was the big angler fish bulb, another was the xenomorph’s head shape, both references combined allowed me to create the final concept. As I started to build up the piece I could see the overall shape coming together and I wanted to keep it as close to the original concept as possible, although there was some things that I wanted to change, for example the head was elongated In the original concept but I decided to change this for the 3D sculpt as it would not have made sense if I was to create a full body and if I kept the elongated head I would not have known how to create the rest of the body for this creature so instead I decided to shorten the head and make the creature more fish like by giving him a tail in place of where the elongated head used to be, doing this really make the peace come together and made my sculpt look like a finished piece instead of a floating head with no body. Another thing that I changed from the original concept was the human body hanging off of the Beast, I believe that this would have looked nice but from the angle that I was showing the beast at it would have obstructed the view of the main piece and took away from my overall design also believe that it would have made the Beast too front heavy. Whilst modelling the creature, I knew that I wanted to portray a sense of Fear so I decided to not put any conventional eyes on it and instead I put a scar like slash in place of where one of the eyes would have been, I also decided to go with quite a gaping mouth with sharp teeth and a long  forked tongue almost like that of a mimic. Overall I really enjoyed the modelling process as it was fun to work with the Multires modifier and see how my piece would look in different subdivisions, whilst doing the texturing for my model I didn’t want to use substance painter as I just can’t seem to get a proper handle on it and I am much more proficient in the shader editor within Blender so instead I decided to change my shader nodes into maps by baking the diffuse, roughness and normal values on to separate maps and then export said maps to ue5 with my creature, I found it a bit strange at the start working with the different tools in Unreal Engine especially when trying to change different materials, I then got a grasp of the material nodes in unreal Engine therefore allowing me to get the desired effect on the tail and on the flesh connecting the spine as these were translucent, ultimately I got the effect that I was looking for. I then tweaked about with the different nodes and got the creature’s bulb to emit light, this really pulled the piece together in the sense that it gave the creature a nice rim light along with allowing for nice soft shadows. Starting on a new software is always daunting for me as I don’t know my way around them, but thankfully I was able to pick it up quite quickly, I found it odd that its rendering system didn’t have a setting for still images and instead it took a ‘High resolution screenshot’ but I believe that it’s real time rendering is good enough as to not need a post render other than of course my own post rendering. When I started creating the background in unreal engine it was quite a challenge for me as I had no prior experience with unreal Engine although watching a couple of different tutorials gave me the tools that I needed to make the background that I had envisioned for my character one of the tutorials in particular was very helpful as it gave me a blueprint for an underwater landscape the video was by BFX Factory and the Blueprint was made by Karim Ibrahim, this ultimately gave me a lot of different tools to use such as the depth of the water the god rays within the water and various different lighting effects that I could use, the Blueprint also included fish animations which gave the scene a lot more life and seem to push the underwater aesthetic. I wanted the background to be a bit darker to show that the creature lives in the depths, but this came with a challenge, I had to make it dark to show the depth but also light enough to portray my creature, so I kept tweaking about with the different settings until I got it to a nice middle ground that suited the overall scene. As for the 3D assets that I used in my scene, I gathered a lot of different underwater plants, different corals and shells and I also found some starfish and I thought that this was great for filling out the scene, the overall bulk of the scene was built by big rock scans that I placed throughout the scene to create a more natural environment, I also gathered some different types of architecture to add a hint of interest in to the scene almost as if it was a post-apocalyptic world that has been flooded by water. The post rendering was quite challenging yet fun. I decided to use photoshop as that would be the software that I am most proficient in, and I believed that it would allow me to produce the best outcome. I didn’t want to change the lighting too much in the scene as it was quite nice at the start although it did look a bit flat, so I added some more god rays closer to the camera in to the scene to give a greater sense of depth, I also made the background a little darker to let my creature stand out from the rest of the scene as before it pretty much just blended in, this already gave the scene a lot more life, I then added a more lighting to the creature’s bulb and whilst doing so I decided to create a lens flair to pull the scene together and give it a bit more realism, I just added touch up and highlights to bring the piece to life and create a visually pleasing overall image, I also gave the slash on its face more depth and make it pop out more as when I put everything in to the scene, it seemed to lose a lot of detail. Reflecting on the teaching, I believe it was a fantastic benefit in the introduction to unreal engine and it gave me a running start when I opened the software for the first time, this led to a more comfortable experience whilst doing my work and thankfully never applied any more pressure.

Finally, I love the overall outcome of my piece, although there are certain things that I wish could have gone differently such as some of the UV unwrapping, the unwrapping for the most part went smoothly and didn’t hinder me much at all, but when I got to the tail bones of the creature the UVs just weren’t unwrapping in the way that I wanted them to so after a while I did an easy UV project on them so that I could get them textured and out of the way, it was really hindering me and there where multiple ways that I tried to get them unwrapped, but none of them seemed to work, another thing that I wish had gone differently would be the lighting, I do believe that I found a good middle ground in the way to show lighting and shadows, but I wish that I could have pushed the darkness more and had the main lights source be the angler fish’ bulb, but that wouldn’t have shown the rest of the model and also creating the effect that there is minimal to no background, but I do believe that this would have pushed the freaky side of it and would have also shown the proper environment in which my creature would have been living, in the great depths of the ocean, this also brings me to another point as to why I made the tail see through, as a lot of fish that you see living in great depths tend to have translucent type skin over either their whole body or just on some parts.