Presenting Outcomes 2

Creating The Pieces

Since I had the idea of creating a short story about the life of a stegosaurus, I started in the beginning - a nest with eggs. The eggs were just made from a sphere that was stretched in the y-axis to form an oval-shape. I created their textures using a noise texture node and adding a colour ramp to have 3 different colours in the pattern.  I added a bump map node to create a normal, giving the texture a form of depth. The nest was made by adding a cylinder, lowering it in the middle to create the dent, and then adding a particle system of rectangular strips to mimic a straw-like nest consistency. I animated one of the eggs to shake slightly to show that it was close to hatching.

The next piece showed that the egg was now hatched. I copied the previously created egg and used a loop cut to separate the top of the shell from the bottom, making it jagged by moving the vertices around. This was also the point I made the ferns and trees. The ferns were made from 5 stalks rotated in a circle, each with a simple particle system to simulate leaves. The particle system was randomly placing a plane with a leaf texture on it around the stalks. I created the leaf texture in Photoshop - using my photoshoot as a reference. The trees were a lot more simple - a cylinder with its base widened and slowly getting thinner the more it goes up.

This next piece was a shot of the newly hatched stegosaurus. This was my first time creating, rigging and animating a creature in Blender, but I believe it turned out nicely. I started by getting a reference picture of a baby stegosaurs, I added a cube object and loop cut it to create more vertices to work with. I stretched it out to create the torso and then extruded the front face to create the neck and head. Each limb and the tail were also just extrusions from the main body. I added loop cuts to each one and dragged around the vertices to create the basic shape of the dinosaur. Next, I worked on the head, adding more detail by subdividing it using the sculpt mode to create the bony head. The plates were a cube object subdivided and stretched and then copied down the dinosaur's back.

Rigging is the process of basically adding a skeleton to the model so it can then be animated. It was fairly simple: add an armature, and then extrude it down the dinosaur's back to create the basic spine shape. At two points down the spine, I split off the armature to create the leg bones. I connected the armature to the skin with automatic weights (automatic weights let Blender decide what parts of the mesh can be stretched and by how much when moved using an armature). With this done, I connected the separate objects (back plates and the eyes) to the armature so they would move with the body too. As for the animation, It was fairly simple, just keyframe the position of the skeleton, rotate the armatures, add a keyframe at another point. With this I was basically done, I put it in a simple scene with ferns and trees and rendered it.

Next I had planned on creating a waterfall scene with animated water and foam. So I started by creating a basic scene consisting of a forest, a sunset and river which I put a tree over and placed the previously made dinosaur on top. The river and waterfall were simple textures I had created in Photoshop, put on a plane and keyframed to make them move to simulate a flow of water. The foam was a rectangle with a particle system on it. The particle system was randomly placing textured planes within its area, so I made it so that each frame would change the placement of planes to a new random one, this simulated the chaotic splashing of running water and foam quite well.

Now, I wanted to show the passage of time to show that the dinosaur was growing. So I thought of having a shot of a lake with the seasons changing. I started by creating the scene - a few trees, ferns and a small pond. I started by creating the easier to make seasons - spring and summer. These were both just the same lake with some lighting changes to fit the mood of the respective season. As for autumn, I changed the ground texture to have fallen leaves, and added rain. The rain was once again, a Photoshop texture on a plane that moved in front of the camera. Next, I worked on winter. Winter was very similar to autumn, except for I replaced the raindrops with snowflakes, and turned the grass texture to a snow one.

The next shot was of the dinosaur grown up now, it was made in a very similar fashion to the one of the young dinosaur. I got a reference, inserted a cube object, and extruded and modeled it to get the shape of the basic shape of the dinosaur. Next, I went into the sculpt mode and added detail to the head, feet and torso. Before adding the plates and eyes. I rigged it again, this time the skeleton was a bit more complicated as the body shape was more curved. After adding some simple textures and finishing rigging, I animated it, having it swing its tail similarly to the baby one. I placed it in a simple scene and rendered.

My next idea was planning to finish the dinosaur's life by having it pass in a forest fire caused by a meteor shower. This was to evoke sadness in viewers and to finish its life. The first shot was of meteors falling from the sky. This was relatively simple: a sky texture  on a plane with its hue turned to a deep red for the background. And as for the meteors, they were just a sphere object with a single vertex point dragged out to mimic the trail. I set their texture from a principled BSDF to an emission shader and turned up the bloom to get that glowing effect. I duplicated them around and keyframed them to fall past the camera.

With the meteor shower done, I moved onto the final tragic scene of it standing in a burning forest. I created a simple scene reusing the previously created sky and trees. I pasted in the stegosaurs and changed his pose to be looking up at the burning sky. For the fire, I first tried to use a particle system emitting metaspheres which merged together in a similar fashion to flames, but this didn't look as good as I hoped it would, neither did it loop seamlessly. So, I settled on having glowing spheres placed around with columns of smoke surrounding everything. The smoke was made in a very similar way to the waterfall I had previously created. It was just a texture made in photoshop and placed on a plane that moved vertically. 

The final shot was one of the dinosaur's skull lying amidst some ferns. I believed that this would be a good conclusion to the short story I had made thus far. I brought in the previously made ferns, added in the ground, lighting, and began working on the skull. I used the previously made dinosaur as a rough template for the shape of the skull. The skull was split into two parts - the head and the jaw. I created them by first modeling the outline of the skull, then adding in another object which I would model into the shape I wanted to carve out of the first object. I used the boolean modifier to remove the chunk of the second object that intersected with the original one. This way I hollowed out the skull and added in the eye and nose sockets.