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Polar bear
June 28, 2013
Hey all!
Been working on some things and so haven't been posting as much as usual. But I know you'll luv this one!
A few weeks ago, I received the idea to make a polar bear, sitting on ice, with his paw in the water, but with a very painterly look. That, I believe, was just to show the image had to be simple.
Anyway, having the idea, I started off for MorgueFile to go get reference and there were some stunning shots!! Remember to always check the licenses of the photo's. Very important.
So I wanted to get this image done with dynamic topology. Did not work out, at all! Lol. The faces started clumping, forming this funny string like ribbon from the model. It was just a mess, so I threw that out and went with loop cuts and extrusion and so on. Worked brilliantly! Not advocating against Dynamic Topology at all. I just had a bad first attempt, hahaha.
From my initial search on morguefile, I mainly got side views. Maybe I just missed the rest, but I worked with what I had and just couldn't understand why my bear looked like a rat-dog, hahaha. Didn't pay it much mind, but I knew GOD wasn't gonna let me off with it as it was. So I went on to texture it, add fur to it, groomed it, etc. and finally rigged it.
I used vertex groups like in this tutorial Introduction to Rigging!.
So, after what felt like hours of rigging, I was happy with the bear's movement. Did some adjustments after the main rigging process, because the shoulders moved strange and so on, but overall, the final rig was simple enough. I did have some issues at the start. The armature was not linked to the base mesh, but to the subdivided one, that made for some weird transformations, haha. But with it moved up, things moved right and only the posing was left (and the face).
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Posing followed. With a few ideas, I tried the bear in various places and poses and that face would just not stop, haha. Here are the poses:
After looking at even the one with the huge ice berg, I was still put-off by the look. So I started working on the face again and after finding a proper reference on MorgueFile, it was finally better! A lot of tweaking and the result was this, with the final pose and some compositing:
Thank YOU very much for all the support during this project, not to mention the idea for it in the first place! YOU rock JESUS!
Thank you to all the people who gave feedback and support during this short, but fun project!! Also, a huge thank you to MorgueFile and it's users for their incredible generosity with their content! You make life a whole lot easier for other artists!
Hope you all enjoyed this post a lot! Was fun writing it (and checking it, lol).
Been working on some things and so haven't been posting as much as usual. But I know you'll luv this one!
A few weeks ago, I received the idea to make a polar bear, sitting on ice, with his paw in the water, but with a very painterly look. That, I believe, was just to show the image had to be simple.
Anyway, having the idea, I started off for MorgueFile to go get reference and there were some stunning shots!! Remember to always check the licenses of the photo's. Very important.
So I wanted to get this image done with dynamic topology. Did not work out, at all! Lol. The faces started clumping, forming this funny string like ribbon from the model. It was just a mess, so I threw that out and went with loop cuts and extrusion and so on. Worked brilliantly! Not advocating against Dynamic Topology at all. I just had a bad first attempt, hahaha.
From my initial search on morguefile, I mainly got side views. Maybe I just missed the rest, but I worked with what I had and just couldn't understand why my bear looked like a rat-dog, hahaha. Didn't pay it much mind, but I knew GOD wasn't gonna let me off with it as it was. So I went on to texture it, add fur to it, groomed it, etc. and finally rigged it.
I used vertex groups like in this tutorial Introduction to Rigging!.
So, after what felt like hours of rigging, I was happy with the bear's movement. Did some adjustments after the main rigging process, because the shoulders moved strange and so on, but overall, the final rig was simple enough. I did have some issues at the start. The armature was not linked to the base mesh, but to the subdivided one, that made for some weird transformations, haha. But with it moved up, things moved right and only the posing was left (and the face).
Posing followed. With a few ideas, I tried the bear in various places and poses and that face would just not stop, haha. Here are the poses:
After looking at even the one with the huge ice berg, I was still put-off by the look. So I started working on the face again and after finding a proper reference on MorgueFile, it was finally better! A lot of tweaking and the result was this, with the final pose and some compositing:
Thank YOU very much for all the support during this project, not to mention the idea for it in the first place! YOU rock JESUS!
Thank you to all the people who gave feedback and support during this short, but fun project!! Also, a huge thank you to MorgueFile and it's users for their incredible generosity with their content! You make life a whole lot easier for other artists!
Hope you all enjoyed this post a lot! Was fun writing it (and checking it, lol).
Posted by Marius Oberholster. Posted In : General
