Prehistoric's life recnstructions

Hello everyone, i am fairly new to Blender Artist as well as blender itself, i have only actually going deep into learning blender about 2 months ago after years of messing around with modeling and texturing only, as that was all i needed to do in my game modding days. i have not try out all of the components of blender and i would love to learn more from the experts.

so, being a paleontology fan, my works will mostly be prehistoric animals reconstruction scenes. this is my second scene, the first one was just something ripped off from a youtube tutorial, so nothing to show there, but this i made on my own:

and here is the same thing but with no compositing:

the trees, which was suppose to be red woods tree, i will need to redo, as they look way too ugly. i wonder if there is any better way to make trees than the sapling addon?

the water fall, simulated using smoke simulator, but it is very diluted, i haven’t found the right settings to make it denser. the compositing did helped a bit though.

so that’s my work so far, any critics are much welcomed.

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so i was playing around with the smoke and i thought low-res smoke looks better than high-res for simulating water, i was also told that the color of the ground is very unrealistic (and it surely was) so i changed it to a blackish color and make the moss greener, also added a separate texture for it. then i cranked up the intensity of the sky to give a more orange reflection on everything, and finally makes everything gloomier and darker as it is suppose to be sunset:


is it looking better?

The waterfall looks sweet. And i like the plants on the foreground. The t-rex needs some love maybe a little more lighting

thanks! ok so scene lighten up a bit, added some details for the cliff and… that’s it, finally will be remaking the trees:


i probably don’t even need to say this but this is just test renders, with only 100 samples, so don’t worry about the pixelating and noisy-ness

also, here are 2 quick showcase renders of the t.rex, who i actually named Ace :stuck_out_tongue:



new project! Alamosaurus!


modeled, sculpted, textured, rigged, posed, scene set up in blender, some compositing in PS CS6

Looks very cool, I didn’t think a t-rex would look right with feathers but I think you pulled it off! Good luck with this project.

Quite cool. I think the top of your water fall is a bit out of level, which looks odd. Also, the sun seems to be setting at the back of the picture, but the cliff seems to be lit from the camera side.

Good job on the proto-feathers though. They look the part.

@Owldude: the feathers thing only feels strange because we were brought up to think of theropods without feathers. People fifty years from now will probably think bald theropods look wrong, since by then the feathers thing will be well established.

(I can remember when theropods dragged their tails like lizards).

thanks for the feedback. like Gumboots said the feathers is almost a must for any accurate T.rex reconstruction. the waterfall do look pretty weird, partly cause i’m not that familiar with the smoke simulator yet.

i forgot to include the eyes in the sketchfab model, so sorry about that :stuck_out_tongue:

I think the waterfall would become better if you add first some sort of waterfall texture to the background and then that smoke simulation on it. Because now it looks like dust is falling down and it cannot be right. Lighting would also need some work to do. :slight_smile: Something with the ferns makes them look little procedural. But i think this could be really awesome scene when you complete it. Your dinosaur models are awesome!

That sounds like a plan. Good thinking.

I think the walls and floor of the terrain might look a bit more realistic if you added a displacement map. There are ways to make an estimated displacement map image from a photo texture image, but a simpler solution would be to just use a procedural texture. Either way, the surface shape and lighting on the terrain might look more realistic.

One very popular resource for that sort of thing is Andrew Price’s “How to Make a Realistic Asteroid Tutorial” (Can’t post links until I have 10 posts. Sorry).

thanks for the feedback guys, i’ll work more on that scene when i have time. i have also watched some of Andrew Price’s tutorials but haven’t check them all out yet, but i will definitely watch the asteroid one.

i also tend to have the habit of making new things before i finished the older one, i always have this syndrome even back in my game modding days. just because i got a new idea over the night and can’t help it but work on it the next morning. here’s a tylosaurus, sculpted with blender

will upload to sketchfab later. this is by far my most detailed sculpt yet, with 5 subdivisions level. i want to crank it to 6 but for now it’s already pass 1 million verts, and my laptop is pretty slow so i don’t think it can handle it. so i’ll just leave the rest of the details to the texture map. here’s the diffuse map:

I think the new models of feathered therapods are going to kill all interest in dinosaurs for a lot of kids in the future, they don’t look scary or fierce at all anymore.

Also, I’m not really sure how sound the idea of feathered dinosaurs are since the supposed base for the feathers may simply be an artifact of skin decay (small features such as pores get more exaggerated). I would also ask why they would’ve not found preserved imprints of feathers around the skeleton, a lot of science done these days is simply not objective at all in my view.

well if a kid can lose interest in paleontology that easy, screw them. nature doesn’t care if an animals look scary or fierce under the human’s eyes or not, if the animal’s anatomy works, giving it a better chance to survive, then it’s good. and it’s the scientists mission to uncover the truth, not to please some random child. if you wish to make a bad-ass, feather-less T.rex, go ahead, no one stopping ya, but that rex wil definitely not be an accurate reconstruction, which is what i’m aiming for.

as for evidence of feathers, you should research more about that, it’s true that no direct evidence of feathers on T.rex have been found yet, but given the fact that many of it’s relatives, big and small have been confirmed to have it (and not just because of base for the feathers was found, the actual feathers fossils itself), and also others environmental and anatomical reasons, it is very likely that T.rex also posses feathers.

Regardless of how fluffy it was or was not, a T. rex was still 20 feet tall, with huge serrated fangs and a ravenous appetite. I fail to see how this can be legitimately described as “not scary”. By the time a feathery one has lunched half the cast in the next Jurassic Park sequel, my bet is that plenty of kids will still be thrilled to bits. :smiley:

I would also ask why they would’ve not found preserved imprints of feathers around the skeleton…
Why would you ask that, when plenty of them have been found?

Oh, I know. You’re a creationist, and therefore immune to any evidence you don’t like. Ok. Nice day for it. have fun. :slight_smile:

since i have seen so many arguments like this on other paleontology forums, i don’t wanna see it again, especially in my topic, so please drop it.

a test render of the tylosaurus, i’m pretty pleased with it already, i’ll be moving on to other components soon


I quite understand, and am happy to drop it. I’m over that so-called “debate” myself.

T. Rex look better in wool anyway.

The tylosaurus looks awesome by the way. These must be really time consuming.