Stina And The Wolf

An Ongoing film project in collaboration with the University of Portsmouth and Foam digital/Pipecatcher films; in which i worked as a junior animator.

A personal project; Herd is a short film following a herd of sheep. One of the Lambs goes to near the forest edge and draws the attention of something sinister...

Owl Lady character model - Creep AMV

fnaf x doechii 

Trex 2025 (Work in progress)

Trex 2025: retopology

Retopology is a crucial process when making any character for animation; you need to get the number of polygons to the smallest functional level, as well as create a topology that will allow your character to deform correctly.

Retopology seems always to be the least liked stage of creation, it can be tedious and frustrating, especially to beginner artists. I find that taking advantage of add-ons is a big help. However, i would always encourage beginners to start by doing it without the assistance of addons in order to actually understand it better. So when you move to make more complicated projects where addons don't offer more assistance, you know how to fix things. 

I use the Reptoflow4 beta to help speed up this process; I very much recommend it to Blender users. It takes some getting used to, but it is well worth the price in my opinion.

One thing that frustrates me personally when it comes to retopology is that you never get to keep the same amount of detail without making the model "heavy". BUT you can solve this through normal maps! which I will be exploring in Substance Painter.

Trex 2025: texture research

Before texturing, it's always a good idea to gather references and do some extra research!

Trex would have primarily lived in what is now Western North America, which would have hypothetically been similar to a Louisiana flood plain, yet still had large open spaces as well as forests. You can imagine that a large predator like the T Rex would have used ambushing where it could and would have been running down prey on open plains. For these reasons, I want my Trex to look suited to the dark edges of a swamp or forest, able to blend into the treeline, ready to run out.

Shows such as Prehistoric Planet and Walking with Dinosaurs often depict the T Rex a greenish brown, with a lighter underbelly and coloured arches over its eyes (see images at the bottom of the post)

These colour patterns are also seen in modern-day crocodiles/alligators.

With my Trex, I also want to make it extra creepy and keep the horror theme going. With my design i want to keep in mind the mood of the scene ill be building, perhaps my Trex will be darker overall then pre-existing designs, make it blend in more with the night and maybe experiment with more un-natural colouring; making it reminiscent of the Trex from the jurassic park books, whom i always imagined being as unnatural looking as it behaved. This unnatural look should aim to be achieved as subtly as possible, tho otherwise it'll spoil the look of the T-rex and make it too cartoony. Lighting will also be crucial for the final result!

My Trex design falls into a middle ground between cartoon and realism; I aimed to give it a painterly look while still being somewhat believable. One thing I wanted to include was the skull-like pattern on the face and the scars on the mouth to look like it's been in some sort of fight. I did my texturing in Substance Painter 2024 (Steam edition); I'm finding the transition from using Blender texturing to Substance a little difficult, as I'm just not used to most of the more advanced tools yet, not having used Photoshop or Adobe products much in the past. But I'm sure the more projects I do with it, the better my models are going to look!

Overall, I'm really happy with the design, and I'm looking forward to rigging and adding some props to this!