Prehistoric Diorama - Pleistocene

Before I started any modelling or sculpting the Pliestocene diorama piece, I roughly sketched out on how I want the Titanis and American mastodon diorama piece would look for this piece. The depiction I originally wanted to create was titanis looking at mastodon in the distance in the open savannahs.

For this geological period, I tried to create organic 3D model of Inostrancevia during Post-Production but I struggled to make it look anatomically accurate to the real animals. Also, I couldn't find any good references to match the proportions and anatomy based on recent reconstruction of Titanis and American Mastodon. Luckily, I decided to create its skeleton than trying to create its organic look as it was lot easier to model to create the skeletal parts of the animal skeleton to create accurate 3D skeelton model of Titanis and American Mastodon. Here is the scrapped WIP of creating WIP Titanis and American Mastodon organic 3D model.

Titanis bird model:

Low Poly:

After outlining the base of the animal figure, I tried to extrude to create the 3D model look more three-dimensional so I can modify the mesh by pulling the vertices and scale to match the proportions of the actual animal. However, the mesh itself looked extremely crumbled and ugly after I extruded the outline which caused me to think that I need to fix it or redo it to make the mesh look more cleaner and organic by making the topology less complex and use the 3D cube mesh to create the base of the Titanis model. Using 3D cube mesh meant that the model is already three-dimensional so I didn't need to extrude the mesh which helped me to make the mesh look more clean and topology simplistic so I can modify the mesh to better match the proportion of the actual animal as I tried to pull and stretch vertices/edges/faces of the mesh. The complexity of the topology makes it more harder for me to continue modelling as the mesh will stop letting me to insert vertices and makes the mesh look more crumbled after apply smoothing, this causes the mesh to be unusable and causes loading times to slow down the software due to high topology being applied.

I tried different method to create the base of titanis by using cylinder mesh so I can accurately outline the animal turkey like body. However, it also didn't really work out as well so I had to decided on how I'm able to create the Titanis model which lead me to decide to do 3D sculpting because sculpting is lot more easier to sculpt complex shapes to create anatomical parts of creatures/characters in 3D sculpting.

Sculpting:

I tried to create the base sculpt to make the Titanis model during middle of Post-Production but, I couldn't find any good references in all angles of Titanis or terror birds in general to help me match the anatomical proportions and features of the animal. Also, I was running out of time and had to decide on what geological era diorama pieces that I need to scrap so I can focus on the other ones to complete for my FMP so I decided to sadly scrap the Pliesotcene diorama piece to focus on the other geological era diorama piece. However, I can talk about on how I made WIP progress of Titanis model before scrapping it.

Firstly, I sculpted the turkey like body to create the body mesh of titanis. For the neck, I originally used the tube brush to make the neck to connect to the body mesh but, the tube mesh didn't really worked out as it didn't look natural or organic as it looked more floppy chicken toy than an muscular neck. So, I decided to use the mask brush instead to create the neck as I can use the masking to pull out the body mesh to make the neck while also making sure that the neck matches the proportion of Titanis.

Lastly, I sculpted the head meshes before sadly scrapping it in favour for the other diorama pieces due to time management and, I found better references that helped me to complete these other geological eras to create full 3D model of prehistoric animal as my final assignment for FMP.

American Mastodon:

Originally, I tried to shift from Maya to Blender as I find Blender better software when it comes to making low poly meshes due to its simplistic and manageable but creative workflow to create creature/character models for games or short films. I use Blender back in the past when I tried to make my Dorito commercial for unit and found it to be better experience in terms of workflow and understanding on how to use tools in Blender due to massive amount of tutorials and more easily accessible than Maya. While Maya is best for animation and rigging, I found that the software wasn't great when it came to low poly modelling so I had to shift into Blender so I'm able to reach the deadline and create the base model as quickly as I can to complete this project of my geological eras diorama pieces project. However, I was running lot of time as I was late during Post-Production so I wasn't able to create organic mesh of American mastodon so I decided to sadly scrapped the Pleistocene diorama piece.