Spring-jaw: NPR Monster with Painterly Textures

This is a diminutive inter-dimensional monster that gets chased by the cat Gurmitch in my film project. Whenever you see a cat batting at something you can’t see, just remember that cats perceive higher spatial dimensions than we do :slight_smile:




Aside from some touch up on the eyes using Krita, this creature was made entirely in Blender. The name “Spring-Jaw” came from the fact that this monster originally had a spring-shaped mouth. I scrapped that aspect during sculpting - the design didn’t work in 3d. I instead reversed the jaw to keep some of the weirdness - the basis being that three dimensional objects passing through four dimensional space can appear turned inside out.

There’s still quite a bit of touch-up painting and animation-friendly rigging to do. Right now I’m having second thoughts regarding the overall visual style of my short film - so these textures might be tossed out completely.

On a side note, despite anti-aliasing and the sampling filter set at 0.1, there’s still faint gray lines along the texture seams. If anyone knows any further methods to get rid of them, I’d appreciate the advice.

hehe, awesome!

I think this is great, I’d really like to see you use the dark lines you have with deformation/shape keys to add some fun cartoonish creases maybe during movement?

Wacky and dark…I like. :slight_smile:

Thanks for the compliments!

Coalminds: I’ve experimented a bit on this model using Freestyle and the internal edge render - nothing worked very well. The mesh is rather low poly; all the muscle definition, wrinkles, and plant-like growth is painted on. Any edge rendering beyond the silhouette results in straight lines over curved surfaces and creases in odd places. There’d be too much key framing and clean up to get good results.

I may, however, animate the textures to get some dynamic shading - particularly have creases in the joints darken as they flex.

By the way, is your comic done using Blender? Excellent work.

No, I use photoshop, i’m mainly learning blender to animate the trailer for pitching it as an animated studio to a few places like amazon. Thanks though it’s been a fun project to work on.

I tried out the freestyle and a couple other settings with low poly models and had the same response as you, the only way I was happy with the results was to draw over the finished product in Toon Boom or just keep things super simple.

you may be interested in the child of light trailer btw. It’s based on Amano’s painted art and really shows how far you can push this rendering/texturing style I think:

Reminds me of Machinarium. For myself, it was “Blackwater Revival” that finally pushed me into doing animation - before, I’d just planned to use Blender to model scenes for a comic book (I’m fairly talented at drawing and sculpting animals, creatures, and people - but linear perspective escapes me - or at least the desire to learn doing it free hand).

I recently saw this at the Blender NPR website - I’m definately going to use lattices to get some squash and stretch, but not nearly in depth as what they did :slight_smile:

Machinarium and Limbo are my two favorite games (visual design wise) of the last 4-5 years, I’m hoping the new Final Fantasy game might challenge them. Really loved that game.