DinoReplicas - dinosaur bone models and more

tarnyloo73

Well-Known Member

• Jul 29, 2018

• #101

Some scarring added to the non-lipped rex. A little lighter and more scratchy than the lipped version, thought I'd try a slightly different look for the damage.

Guess that wraps up the project for the time being. I think I've achieved basically what I set out to do in post #2 back in the mists of time somewhere. I doubt I'll be doing any more WIPs, at least ones this detailed. I've enjoyed doing it but as a rough estimate it's tripled my project time. The feedback has been great though so thanks guys.

Anyway I really want to move on and get my head into something else. I'm tempted to do more life restorations after all the time I've spent messing about with skulls and bones. This thread will go a bit quieter until I can get some photography done. In the meantime I'll get the 3D prints made for all sizes and at some point make them available on Shapeways.

 

Darth Brass

Sr Member

• Jul 29, 2018

• #102

All so, so amazing. Great work!

 

Too Much Garlic

Master Member

• Jul 29, 2018

• #103

Thanks for the explanation. Makes sense regarding where the muscles are attached.

 

tarnyloo73

Well-Known Member

• Aug 13, 2018

• #104

My fledgling Youtube channel

Figured it was about time to give Youtube a go
This is my first attempt at a promo but hey you've got to start somewhere!

 

Last edited by a moderator: Nov 8, 2018

shareahack

Active Member

RPF PREMIUM MEMBER

• Aug 14, 2018

• #105

Well done, subscribed! When I have a little more disposable income I'd love to start collecting all the skulls :thumbsup

 

tarnyloo73

Well-Known Member

• Aug 17, 2018

• #106

shareahack said:

Well done, subscribed! When I have a little more disposable income I'd love to start collecting all the skulls :thumbsup

Click to expand...

Thanks!

 

tarnyloo73

Well-Known Member

• Sep 18, 2018

• #107

Wahey! following a busy summer, my photographer friend has a little spare time, so I should be having the rex models photographed this week.
I didn't want to put the models on Shapeways until I had some photos but in the meantime I've been messing about with some 3D renders in the style of a stand mounted model.

I don't think we'll be able to match the same lighting in the studio but the photos will be done blue-screen (or green-screen) so I'm hoping to drop in the same red background.

 

darthsideous

Well-Known Member

• Sep 25, 2018

• #108

Holy smokes, your 3D prints look fantastic, then I see your sketches and 3D renders and there all gorgeous.

 

tarnyloo73

Well-Known Member

• Oct 2, 2018

• #109

darthsideous said:

Holy smokes, your 3D prints look fantastic, then I see your sketches and 3D renders and there all gorgeous.

Click to expand...

Thanks, the photos are all done and the models are on Shapeways (you might have seen the thread) but I'll still find a use for these somewhere.

 

tarnyloo73

Well-Known Member

• May 20, 2019

• #110

Going to start a Styracosaurus skull to add to my Shapeways shop products. I got a bit bored with making dinosaur skulls towards the end of last year but I've after wasting some time messing with other (mostly abandoned) projects I've got the bug again, surprised it's took me this long.

I'll post visual updates my progress here in parallel to threads on Blender Artists and the Dinosaur Toy Forum. Won't be as in depth as my rex skull from last year.

 

tarnyloo73

Well-Known Member

• May 20, 2019

• #111

Well there's decent references online for the two main specimens. Going to base my Styracosaurus on the holotype (CMN 344). Found an online copy of Ryan, Holmes, & Russell, 2007 (linked below), a great study with loads of info including a great 3 view drawing which corrects the distortions in the fossil. I'll also be studying photos found on the internet.

A revision of the Late Campanian centrosaurine ceratopsid Styracosaurus from the Western Interior of North America

I'm going to run up my own scale drawing though. I prefer to do this because I need to learn the shape and sketching it out helps me fix the form in my head.

 

Last edited: May 20, 2019

tarnyloo73

Well-Known Member

• May 22, 2019

• #112

Spent the last couple of nights scribbling, some false starts accompanied by plenty of swearing. This is the first of the orthographic drawings (call it revision 3.5) though I might make a ventral view as well.

A few more available online references.

Brown, Barnum; Erich Maren Schlaikjer (1937). "The skeleton of Styracosaurus with the description of a new species". American Museum Novitates. no. 955: 12. Retrieved 2007-03-29.

Gilmore, Charles W. (1930). "On dinosaurian reptiles from the Two Medicine Formation of Montana". Proceedings of the United States National Museum. 77 (16): 1–39.

Not much info on the back/underside of styracosaurus skull but nice drawing of Centrosaurus/Monoclonius in the next paper. Apart from the head ornamentation the centrosaurines are very similar so I think I'm OK basing details on this.

Brown, Barnum. A complete skull of Monoclonius, from the Belly River Cretaceous of Alberta. Bulletin of the AMNH ; v. 33, article 34.

Full description of the postcranial skeleton of CMN 344, useful if I decide to do the whole skeleton (has a nice front view skull photo.

Robert B. Holmes, Michael J. Ryan, & Alison M. Murray. Photographic Atlas of the Postcranial Skeleton of the Type Specimen of Styracosaurus albertensis with Additional Isolated Cranial Elements from Alberta

Also accumulating a photo library of Styracosaurus and Centrosaurus skull photos.

 

tarnyloo73

Well-Known Member

• May 25, 2019

• #113

Can't find decent reference for the inside of the Styracoasaurus skull but there's some for the closely related Centrosaurus and much of Triceratops's inner skull is covered fairly well in published works. I've been scratching my head over this for a couple of days but I think I can work around it.

Apart from the signature features of each species there's a lot of uniformity among the ceratopsian group, especially centrosaurines so these more obscure areas will be based on Styracoasaurus's cousins. I'm not going to show these parts in great detail anyway because they can only be partly glimpsed through the nose and the orbits but I can sculpt them loosely to show some internal structure.

Ceratopsian heads are highly modified with a huge beak and chewing apparatus at the front and the rear skull elongated into a frill, because of this the back palette and lower brain-case bones are sort of smushed together at the mid point longitudinally. These sketches are my efforts to 'feel' my way around the internal skull bones. There's only so far I can go with drawing, time to dive into some 3D modelling I think.

 

Last edited: May 25, 2019

tarnyloo73

Well-Known Member

• May 26, 2019

• #114

Not very motivated this weekend but I'm going to make a start putting down some polygons tonight. For the next 3 weeks its Springwatch on BBC 2 so I'm not going to get much creative work done . One of the (many) things I like about Blender is the easy template image setup. Due to natural laziness I make it even easier for scale modelling by making my images conform to a particular size.

My Styracosaurus orthographic is drawn at 1/10th scale on a grid 20cm wide. That means I can just crop the scanned drawing on the grid lines and set the background image in Blender to 2 meters, instantly the correct size! The same image is used in both top & side view, I've made sure the top view is rotated and centered on the origin.

 

T

thorst

Well-Known Member

• May 26, 2019

• #115

I didn't know you can use an alpha channel for the background images. Thanks for the tip!

Following with great interest!

 

tarnyloo73

Well-Known Member

• May 27, 2019

• #116

thorst said:

I didn't know you can use an alpha channel for the background images. Thanks for the tip!

Click to expand...

I use the 'colour to alpha' filter in Krita to quickly make the pic background transparent, it works great placed in front of objects with the opacity set low.

 

tarnyloo73

Well-Known Member

• Jun 1, 2019

• #117

Been away from this for how long now? 1 week? More? I've been spending some time looking at the internals of ceratopsian skulls. Anyway I can only look at 100 year old museum publications for so long so I've made a start.

Took a different approach from last year's rex skull models. Rather than building a sub-D model from the drawing I thought I'd try making a template sculpt first, not intended to be the final model but hopefully that will make sense later on. Starting with a subdivided cube I've used Blender's dynamic topology to create the initial shape, mostly with the SculptDraw and Move brushes. It's a great tool for free-form sculpting and very easy to add/reduce detail.

 

tarnyloo73

Well-Known Member

• Jun 1, 2019

• #118

Into edit mode to make & bridge holes in the mesh, then back into Dyntopo to refine

 

tarnyloo73

Well-Known Member

• Jun 2, 2019

• #119

That's the main form mostly laid out, bit more still to do on the underside. Not too refined as it's a scaffold for the next stage. The inner bones I'll work out in sub-D polys later.

Added some lightmap UVs on the scaffold sculpt so I could paint this poly map (red lines). It's mostly a guide and I'm not wedded to it, there'll probably be changes once I start placing polys.

 

tarnyloo73

Well-Known Member

• Jun 6, 2019

• #120

Another long absence busy with other stuff, Really need to make a push to wrap this up. I'm setting up a low-poly base model using the painted lines as a guide. With face snapping turned on, it's easy enough to lay down polygons. There's a mirror modifier on the retopo mesh but most of the time it's turned off.

For placing a vertex that's meant to be on the centre-line I find it convenient just to zero it's X co-ord manually in the properties panel. Now it's just a case of working my way around until it's all built. Always a lot of tidy up required as the model develops, inner bones will need extra attention.

 

Last edited: Jun 6, 2019