-Reference – Codex Seraphinianus-
Page:84- 3 tiered bird coming out of an egg
Skillsets- Rigging / 3D Animation / Sculpting
The skills listed above are areas I’m looking to expand my knowledge in. Beyond just building these skills, my current goals for this project also require me to be more mindful of my time. I’m planning to set aside specific days of the week for practical work and writing blog posts. Another thing I need to work on is sticking with a concept without constantly reworking it. I tend to get indecisive and end up tweaking things more than necessary. I enjoy sculpting a lot more than rigging or animation, mostly because I lean towards the creative side, but the technical parts take me longer to get my head around. Still, I know I’ll get there eventually. One thing I struggle with is explaining my process—it’s easier for me to just show how I did something than to talk through it.
-Bird Concept- Shoebill-
Side profile
Front profile
other bird references- Dodo from sketchfab to help with the overall shape of head and inside of the beak
-Shoebill Sculpt-
Weird creasing of polys- wouldn’t disappear whilst sculpting
masked the crease and separated it from the bill ,deleting the problem area, i then went into the beaks topology closed holes and smoothed out the mesh.
The bill is coming along nicely , the head at this time was tedious trying to ,make it look like the references head
From the front profile of the model the head looks too wide to be that of the shoebill crane
Changed head shape
Slimmed down the side of head to make it fit the shoebills profile more
Instead of dyna meshing the entire model to join the head and neck i selected the head and masked the bottom of the mesh then deleted that excess part of the mesh .
Examples below show the process – Redone the process for the head to the same as the neck. Now both parts of the mesh are missing the deleted polys
After deleting certain parts of the mesh i then needed to poly group the head and neck together so that they become the same mesh
Then going into the brush tab i selected z modeler , bridge ,2 holes and selected arcs and lines
For both meshes to be joined together i selected the edge of the neck whilst holding shift then selecting the edge of the heads mesh which then bridged the head and neck together , i had to redo this a few times as when you move the cursor during the bridging in unaligned the bridge in some areas leaving holes in the mesh
Model after bridging head and neck together
Adding more detail to the birds face while readjusting the size of the head
Sliming down and adding detail to the beak and body using the noise brush
Finished model
-Rigging-
Alec assisted me when creating the rig as when i had originally done it i had simplified it little too much which led to more deforming of the mesh in areas that i didn’t want
Top beak moving when the bottom beak moves which isnt supposed to happen
Top beak no longer moving with lower beak- Selected beak mesh , edit mode selected the vertices that were moving , vertex groups then deleted the top beak. Removing vertex groups stops a mesh from moving with another bone because it removes the influence of the vertex groups on the mesh
-Animation-
When deciding how to approach the egg breaking and revealing the shoebill, I initially considered a simple method of cutting the topology in zigzags around the centre, then separating the mesh to create a cracking effect. However, I didn’t want the egg crack to look too basic. Originally, I planned to use the Cell Fracture add-on for a more dynamic effect. But when I tried to implement it through Quick Effects, the fracture didn’t behave as expected—it left gaps in certain areas of the shell. Deleting the non-fractured cells created holes where the crack should have been, so I ultimately decided to scrap the idea.
Using the knife tool i cut along the mesh to create cracks on the shell after inputting all of the cracks , selecting all i then split it from the mesh so that they are visible on the mesh .
Cracking of the egg, pace is extremely fast and not in motion shake to crack
Slowed down the shaking of the egg when cracks appear
Had to change the cracking of the egg as i was unable to spilt the top properly because of where i had placed the original cracks, egg cracks where developed by going into edit mode and manually creating crack like marks with the knife tool. however making sure that cutting certain points wouldn’t overlap each other or it would leave me unable to split the top and bottom of the mesh . Then allowing the normal egg to be veiwed until frame
Using child of constraint attaching the constraint to the bird
Attaching the shell to the beak and head was the easy part however trying to get the parent to let go and allow the shell to fall to ground was the hardest part. i applied shell transform to visual for the shell to have the correct axis however many problems occurred throughout this process such as the shell not following the intended path and the shell constantly going back to its original position . After many failed attempts i manged to get the egg shell to fall to the ground without have the head of the bird influencing the movement of the shell, however the parent parent constraint malfunctions when the birds head impacts the shell leaving it to pop of the head instead of falling . Although because the animation for this egg shell is fast paced its not overly noticeable but there is a delay from the impact to then shell falling.
Rescaled the bird to make the deform egg shells size less noticeable
-Texturing-