dedennedillo
Member
I have been posting some of my works here for a while, pertaining to artistic but realistic depictions of animals. I had a hunch one or two of you were thinking, 'how does he do it?' And so now you will know.
When creating animals, I only use three programmes. Mozilla Firefox for gathering reference, Blender for modelling and rendering, and Krita for texture painting and post-processing.
The first bit of any animal's creation is gathering reference. This is fairly easily done, especially if you are doing a mammal. When I did my caribou, I was able to find much of what I needed on the internet. This would govern what the colours would be like, what the texture would be like, what the animal itself would be like.
Though in some cases I do like to see the animal myself in person to get a better idea. So now as I am doing hamerkop for another project, I took the opportunity recently to visit a zoo and photograph the hamerkop there. This left me with valuable references to use.
And of course for birds the Macaulay Library is utterly valuable. Nuff said.
From there the animal's shape is created in Blender using the reference. All 3D models are made of 3 connected elements - vertices, edges, and faces. A vertex, of which vertices is the plural, is a single point. An edge is two or more vertices connected together. Edges can form faces but they can also be hollow. Faces are solid.
I try to place the vertices where they anatomically make sense. That way I am left with a shape correct to the species.
The same is done with birds. The flight feathers are usually seperate models.
Once the animal is fully modelled, its vertices are placed onto a 2-Dimensional medium called a UV map. The vertices and faces work as co-ordinates to where a texture can project onto the model.
In Krita, I get the base colour from a variety of photos of choosing. Sometimes I change the opacity, or visibility, of the layers to get more of a mix. It is possible to photosource using Krita, but I do not use parts of the original photo in my works. The textures of fur or feathers are hand-drawn using brushes.
Now we have a model that looks like what it is meant to. But if it is a mammal we are doing there's one thing that we are missing... as painted hair can only take us so far!
I use a paid addon from VFX Grace which helps to deal with hair. It is by no means mandatory but it does make my life easier!
Nice and fluffy!
Getting hair as you like it with mammals is often the most time consuming part of the endeavour. Thankfully rigging is easier, but of course when rigging birds wings can often give you a headache!
And once the animal is rigged, you only have to render it, which can take some time. But once it's done - voila!
I think computer graphics such as this has untapped potential for natural history artwork. Even today many guides and such are hand-drawn, and I believe it's good for that as photography doesn't always have consistent quality, and working with live animals has its difficulties. But I do believe that if one takes the time to learn computer graphics as I, they find it to be overall efficient and versatile to use, with basically endless possibilities!
When creating animals, I only use three programmes. Mozilla Firefox for gathering reference, Blender for modelling and rendering, and Krita for texture painting and post-processing.
The first bit of any animal's creation is gathering reference. This is fairly easily done, especially if you are doing a mammal. When I did my caribou, I was able to find much of what I needed on the internet. This would govern what the colours would be like, what the texture would be like, what the animal itself would be like.
Though in some cases I do like to see the animal myself in person to get a better idea. So now as I am doing hamerkop for another project, I took the opportunity recently to visit a zoo and photograph the hamerkop there. This left me with valuable references to use.
And of course for birds the Macaulay Library is utterly valuable. Nuff said.
From there the animal's shape is created in Blender using the reference. All 3D models are made of 3 connected elements - vertices, edges, and faces. A vertex, of which vertices is the plural, is a single point. An edge is two or more vertices connected together. Edges can form faces but they can also be hollow. Faces are solid.I try to place the vertices where they anatomically make sense. That way I am left with a shape correct to the species.
The same is done with birds. The flight feathers are usually seperate models.
Once the animal is fully modelled, its vertices are placed onto a 2-Dimensional medium called a UV map. The vertices and faces work as co-ordinates to where a texture can project onto the model.
In Krita, I get the base colour from a variety of photos of choosing. Sometimes I change the opacity, or visibility, of the layers to get more of a mix. It is possible to photosource using Krita, but I do not use parts of the original photo in my works. The textures of fur or feathers are hand-drawn using brushes.
Now we have a model that looks like what it is meant to. But if it is a mammal we are doing there's one thing that we are missing... as painted hair can only take us so far!
I use a paid addon from VFX Grace which helps to deal with hair. It is by no means mandatory but it does make my life easier!
Nice and fluffy!
Getting hair as you like it with mammals is often the most time consuming part of the endeavour. Thankfully rigging is easier, but of course when rigging birds wings can often give you a headache!
And once the animal is rigged, you only have to render it, which can take some time. But once it's done - voila!
I think computer graphics such as this has untapped potential for natural history artwork. Even today many guides and such are hand-drawn, and I believe it's good for that as photography doesn't always have consistent quality, and working with live animals has its difficulties. But I do believe that if one takes the time to learn computer graphics as I, they find it to be overall efficient and versatile to use, with basically endless possibilities!
