CuteThulhu

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh CuteThulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

This is a cute version of Cthulhu, the body is a slightly modified version of the one from the dragons but the head is of course new. The eye were based on those of Cephalopods and an armature was added to the tentacles so that I could easily re-position them.

For the background an lighting I started with some basic settings from the Pro-lighting-studio addon and then tweaked them to add a bit more blue for a slightly more ‘spooky’ atmosphere.

Dragon

For all your cooking needs

Back in the day I made a bunch of slip cast dragons using a mould made from a modified plastic dinosaur and since then have wanted to create a ‘cute’ dragon from scratch.

This dragon being Welsh is making himself some dragon baked rarebit (the traditional way such things are cooked) and in the below gallery are some of the various other dragons made from this initial mesh.

After creating the basic body, this was then rigged with an armature so that I could easily re-pose the mesh for the different dragon types.

The flame mesh was vertex painted to highlight parts of the flame, this map was then fed into an attribute node which controlled two emission nodes (colours controlled by two colour ramps). this setup was then combined through an Add node so as to increase the overall brightness of the flame. I had initially created this with a node setup for a more realistic flame using the ‘flame’ and ‘density’ options of the attribute node but this more realistic looking flame clashed with the more cartoonish dragon.

The skin was made by mixing values in a colour ramp with a noise texture node and then displacing this with another noise texture node fed into a bump node (instead of using the displacement on the material output node).

The clipart version of the dragons in the gallery below use the shader setup from this CG Cookie tutorial.

Best dammed apple trader

Not much to this one, the phrase ‘best dammed apple trader’ popped into my head for some reason, and the idea for the image followed shortly after that.

Rather than texture painting the apple, here I just used a noise texture and colour ramp, then stretched it in the Z axis with a mapping node, turned out quite well.

Sea Creature

We’re in deep

This is a re-work from an earlier Carrara model and is just a simple imaginary deep sea creature, so a emission shader was added to the materials to create a sense of bioluminescence. 

Mamoof

Have hair will travel.

This is not a baby mammoth but instead Mamoof is a genetically modified pigmy mammoth and is one of the most popular designer pets of the near future.

This has been on my list of things to do for a while but I’ve only recently thought of a setup that I felt would look good, this was also my first real attempt at using the sculpt tools, though most of that is hidden by the hair and the eyes could probably could have done with a bit more work, they looked ok before the fur but it looses some detail in the final render.

I initially created a basic flower (below) but it felt / looked more like an after thought and detracted from the image, so I spent a couple of evenings creating a nicer more elaborate flower.

The grass was also originally a basic hair particle system but again this didn’t really work, I then tried creating and using some grass blades to use as objects for the particle system but this also didn’t quite work for me, so I went back to the hair system and went through multiple iterations of tweaking the hair width/taper settings.  

Cuddlefish

Snuggling with the fishes

So many tweaks, I had meant this to be simple like bumble bee, but i kept looking at the renders and thinking “hmmm not quite happy with that, I think I’ll make a small change”.

Some of these tweaks were upping the number of bones in the tentacles from five bones to errr more due to it looking a bit blocky, the tentacles were also originally smooth, but i then decided to add suckers. 

The body initially was just a uniform material, but this looked a little bland so i added in some texture painting to control a blend with a second material. 

The hair was also originally a single colour and particle system, the colour was ‘jazzed’ up with a colour ramp, and the addition of two more hair emitters, with one of these emitters overlapping with the other two emitters, adding layers to the hair.

The hair was further tweaked in particle editing, to give a controlled direction to the hair so it looked a bit more like the creature(s) were moving through something.

One of the final tweaks was to deform the mouth a bit, to pull up a couple of corners so as to create a hint of a smile so as to make the cuddlefish more friendly.