Pumpkin 2024

 Missed Halloween but November still needs pumpkins right?

Yeerk Design Explorations

I started with the 4 and three part mouths because they felt more interesting and then I pivoted to the 2 because the books said 2 palps. But I wanted to have the palps open to match what the books describe as inconsistent descriptions of a mouth. I also wanted to kinda do a fake out where when the palps are closed the it may still kinda look like a mouth. This coupled with the overall aesthetic of the brain wrinkles because I want to do start designing yeerk tech with a similar design language

The idea being that how the yeerk infests is similar to the proboscis of the ribbon worm. In essence the yeerk actually consists of nothing but raw nerve bundles as seen beneath the skin in the wrinkles. In a,b, and c of the 2 palp version they have visible sacs on the outside where the numbing agent is stored this is excreted through the holes on the interior surface of the palps. This ended up in the final design because if gives a nice area of rest and offers structure for the wrinkles to move around.

Additionally when interfacing with a yeerk computer terminal the rear two appendages contract and these nerve endings are connected to electrical ports where the yeerk can transmit and receive electrical impulses as data

Upon infesting the palps open clasp the ear, secret the numbing and then the yeerk basically flips itself inside out as it sends the branching nerve bundles into the ear canal and then eventually the brain. Filling the cracks with its own branching structures 

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Full Body Hork Bajir 2.0

Full Body Hork Bajir 2.0 Development

During my recent plane rides I had been sketching new ideas for a full body Hork Bajir sculpt. Trying to design something that would match my choice of design aesthetics with a more traditional understanding of the descriptions from the Animorphs books series.
I began with a few pencil sketches:

After which I came home scanned the sketches, cleaned up the ones I liked and then added them to the body sketch to get a feeling of how they flowed with the overall forms:

After this point I blocked out the model using primitives in zbrush

Once I felt good about the blockout I merged everything together, remeshed it for subdivs and the sculpted the forms and finally added the scales via a custom set of VDM brushes I developed for this project. I also created a female variant with custom upper beak and horns.

After this I retopoed and generated uv's inside the whole thing in 3ds max. The model is around 42k tris. I wanted to make an asset that fully utilized UDIMs to make sure I would get maximum resolution across the whole character. 
In total there are 8 sheets - 4 for the body (head, torso, arms, legs) 2 for the Horns (Upper horns on the bust for matching texel density with the Head, and Lower to match the texel density of the body) and then 2 for the Eyes( Inner eye and Cornea). I may add another for an Eye overlay for AO and liquid buildup along the lower lid.

Bakes were done in Marmoset 4 at 4k for each.

I explored color variations and patterns in Substance painter and then proceeded to texture the character with an amalgamation of the various sketches. 

I then exported the result. I rendered it in Marm 3

I also Rendered the Whole thing out in Marmoset 4 in a space that is lit purely by GI and was quite pleased with the result!

Moving forward I will rig and animate the character and likely add some gear for it as well.

 

Hork Bajir Study

A concept study of a Hork Bajir form Animorphs.

Patricia 2.0 Wip

Noodling around with a newer version of Patricia a quick look dev render

Taxxon Study

Continuing the Animorph trend here is my concept of a Taxxon