Prehistoric Life

You may have already seen my Raptor thread in finished projects, but basically what I’m working on here is producing reasonably accurate reconstructions of prehistoric creatures (mainly dinosaurs at the moment) to sell on TurboSquid and also just for my own sake.

The Raptor is not meant to be an accurate representation just to be clear, it is based on the popular depictions of them in Jurassic Park and such.

Brachiosaurus altithorax:


Asteroceras obtusum:


Coelophysis bauri:



Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus:


My Imgur album has high res versions.

simply awesomeness! did you sculpt it with blender? or is it Z brush?

Cheers! All done inside Blender yes. Though I’ve been having trouble with the multires modifier bugging out so I may do the sculpting in Sculptris or something instead.

how many subdivsion levels did you went? and how many verticies. i can only go as far as 1 milion verticies before my blender crash.

I usually do five subdivisions and render at 2 or 3. Maximum number of verts I’ve ever had was about 8 million on the Brachiosaurus. That got pretty laggy though and any more and it’d be unusable.

Started work on Coelophsyis bauri:


Also this time I’ll be sculpting in Sculptris to avoid the dreaded multires spikes bug. Sculptris has its own issues, but at least they’re mostly graphical and don’t irreversibly destroy your sculpt.


Sculpted all the scales on the head by hand. Those on the rest of the body will be provided by a fine detail texture within blender to save me from getting up to unusable numbers of verts. Currently on about 3 million and it’s already starting to have memory problems.

although i think the model is looking great, it could still use some improvements realism wise, the Coelophsyis look really shrink-wrapped, which is a common problem in re-constructing prehistoric animals. the poor thing look like someone took it’s skeleton, covered it with skin and call it a day. it needs more flesh, more fat, and probably a thicker head, to protect the skull and everything. i doubt your model’s buyers would even care about this, but it’s just to do the creature justice.

Uggh, I could have really used your brachi last month for a TV segment on Australian Dinos. Mine sucked

There were good scholarly works though, drawing on footprints and structure.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0078733
And I really liked this one, although I didn’t do any walking in my animation:

https://vimeo.com/59168407

Hi Benjee,

It’s very lovely work but I have to agree a bit about the shrink wrap comment.
The shrink wrap look has become a very contentious issue in recent years and is becoming discredited a lot now.
Also what about trying it with feathers as well ? It most likely had them. Why hold on to the memes of the past.

in the last 10 years or so there has been such a huge seismic shift in the understanding of the life appearances of most dinosaurs.
Especially with the discovery’s from Lianoning in China.
There’s a quiet revolution going on in Paleoart right now but for some reason most of it doesn’t seem to have made it’s way into mainstream culture, films and animation yet.
So many of them the smaller ones especially are now being reveled to have been thickly feathered and likely very close to birds visually.
It’s becoming widely acknowledged that modern birds are basically just dinosaurs.

Also working with Sculptris or Blender. If poly counts are getting a problem. What about trying a slightly retro approach to the textures. Use the sculpting part for the broad shapes and vital forms and masses. Then paint the finer wrinkles and folds in as a cavity map. The way it used to be done a lot when scanning clay maquettes.

Anyway all the best. Looking really nice all of it. Raptor render was great. And it’s great seeing so many dinosaurs up.

Thanks, I agree about the shrink wrapping. Redoing the basemesh now (Sculptris crashed out at about 3.5 million verts which wasn’t enough to finish the whole model) so I’ll be trying out the painted cavity map idea!
Re feathers, I won’t be putting feathers on this one since it’s a little too basal but others will definitely have them. I may put some bristles on the back but until evidence comes up I wouldn’t feel comfortable giving such an early creature feathers. I don’t think there’s evidence for feathers outside of coelurosauria (and the bristles on Psittacosaurus, which could well be unrelated to the feathers of others) but rest assured I have no problems with putting feathers on dinosaurs, on the contrary, I think they look awesome! When I get onto Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor and stuff like that I will definitely be putting feathers on them. Also planning to make a Therizinosaur of some form which will of course have some fuzz.

@3pointEdit: that video looks interesting. Will definitely watch it when I have time to improve my understanding of how they should have moved!

Also just realised I put too many claws on the hindfeet of the Brachiosaurus. Gosh darnit :’)

If you do go with feathers on some of the others this is an interesting link to read…
There are a lot of frustrated paleontologists out there.

Interesting article, thanks! Will be using hair particles for any bristles and stuff like that (and likely for the therizinosaur, since most reconstructions seem to show it being almost fur-like) but modelling the feather contours in for raptors and such.

Wow, that Brachio-animation is fantastic! How did you achieve such a realistic swinging of the loose skin (for example at the throat)?

Really amazing work!

Thorsten

Swinging skin is all softbody, just takes loads of tweaking to get the right feeling of scale and mass behind it.

First texture pass on the Coelophysis, also beefed it up a bit and changed the posture to make it easier to rig.


Textures & materials done except for the claws!


Just the rig to go! I think I’ll skip the bristles/protofeathers on this one since I don’t think they’d go with the colour pattern I’ve chosen.

The rationale for the patterning was to make something that breaks up the outline and makes the animal a little harder to spot in scrub habitat but also allows for visual communication and display between individuals of the same species. These colours are likely from the breeding season in which animals of both genders would develop striking colour patterns to attract a mate. Since dinosaurs were likely incapable of complex vocalization beyond hissing (unless other structures allowed them to make other sounds, like Parasaurolophus trumpeting), visual display was the only means of communication most of them had. The high contrast yellow & black on the lower jaw is inspired by a similar structure in modern birds such as gulls, which provides a target for chicks with developing eyesight in the nest. When jabbed by a chick this spot would trigger a reflex in the parent to regurgitate food for its young. I imagine Coelophysis as being reasonably social animals (not necessarily in a complex way, but at least to the extent of occasionally working together on a kill and perhaps nesting close together for security) and would contend that in the harsh climate of the middle-late Triassic some sort of parenting behavior would be a survival advantage. Of course, all that’s pure speculation, but that’s the thought process behind the colouration.

Finished the rig today. Will be taking a few days out while the turntable renders (I’m away for the weekend so might as well leave it running at a decent sample rate), and then I’ll publish it to TurboSquid and move onto the next creature: Plesiosaurus, an animal that was discovered on the coast just an hour or so away from where I live, which is pretty awesome.

looking really decent! and for animation render, try sheepit render farm, it’s free and is very VERY FAST! i rendered an animation for my rex recently, and the render time was reduced from 5 days, to 6 hours!

I wonder if there is any evidence of a dino Syrinx? For vocalizing like a bird.

Cheers, will look into Sheepit! This didnt take too long to render since it only takes up a small amount of the frame.

As far as I’m aware there isn’t any evidence for a Syrinx in dinosaurs (apart from in Aves itself of course) since it leaves behind traces in the bone which dinosaurs seem to lack. Obviously that’s not to say they couldn’t have vocalized at all or had structures which we haven’t discovered yet which allowed them to make other sounds, but it’s reasonable to assume that visual communication was fairly important for them.

Plesiosaurus all textured up. Just need the eyes and teeth and then it’s rigging time.


The benefit of having made so many of them now is that all the material work is basically already done. I just append the material from another creature and tweak it and plug in the new textures til it looks right. Everything is modeled to scale too so the SSS works pretty well on everything without too much tweaking.


Stegosaurus stenops nearly done. Just need detail texture on the plates (debating whether they should be scaly or not) & rig it.

The plates can change colour from a dull yellow/green to red, simulating the animal flushing them with blood.