These are the new drawings of the muscle system as well as a quick test can of the actual model. What I did was put these dots on the model and then used the 3d scanner to get this digital mesh pictured above.

I've started working with the new scanner friendly armature I made and I have to say its working really well. One obvious change Ive made is to the mouth. After playing around with what my last design, which was the 4 talon camel spider inspired mouth, I've decided to go back to the sideways jaws with the beak since it seems far more practical and I dare say a little more scary. Working with the clay is also making it a lot easier to flesh out the arms into a working layout. As a side bar, sculpting in the car with this thing on my lap proved to be an interesting challenge. A benefit I'm already seeing for this over just doing it on the computer is that I can actually feel the muscles as they are made which helps with visualizing how the creature moves and interacts with objects. However, the bigger advantage comes from the ability to experiment and quickly reset if the muscles seem weird or unworkable. True that I could do a similar thing with multiple save files on a computer but doing that leaves only a few snapshots of the project and the thing I want to rest or change may exsist in many of those save files. This means I may have to lose work on other unrelated parts of the the creature.. With clay I can just smooth it out and get back to square one in a manner of seconds which is much easier and saves all my other work.

I was talking with Shawn in the 3D lab and he told me that oil based clay was a great medium to use because it scans so well. He recommended rethinking that armature (top picture) so that we could more easily scan it in. I was thinking that an armature like the top picture would allow me to work on the sculpture without too much difficultly and flip over the whole thing and easily view the bottom. He also gave me a 3D scan of the U of M solar car which I put a very simple rig in and animated the mesh a little bit. This was pretty helpful because it allowed me to think about any problems I would have with this method of making a 3D model and it also made me confident that I can over come them.

I spent this weekend finalizing the armature for my piece. I'm about to start putting clay on it but I thought it would be good to take a picture of it right now with no clay on it. Recently I had been spending a lot of time working on my bronze hippopotamus but now I can concentrate on my creatures for this project.

I've made a lot of progress with my thinking about how the creature's skeleton will be. After using the motion studies to decide what I want the creature to do I could start thinking about how to do that. The sketch on the bottom was an attempt to draw the creature but since I want the creature to move so well I switched my process to drawing the skeleton first. The middle drawing is my first attempt at a skeleton that can do what I want it to do. Upon looking at it for awhile I noticed that a lot of the joints, specifically the ones at the top of the legs, just would not work in a convincing way. To fix this I decided to do the back and front legs to be very much like that of a big cat with the exception of the "knees" pointed inward on the bottom of the creatures legs to allow it to spread its points of connact with ground when it is using 8 legs to move. Another major improvement is that the middle arms are not attached to the spine which allows them to be used while the creature is running on its four legs. The inspiration for the wishbone setup of the arms comes for the noble chicken whose shoulder bones are setup in much the same way. Now I need to start thinking about the creature's muscles.

I've made some test animations using a simple rig to help me think about why and how the creature moves the way it does. It was really helpful because I now see this as a creature that lives in caves in mountains. It will use its middle 4 limbs to hang from the walls of the caves, use all 8 of its limbs to get down the mountain as spider would, and it will be able to raise up and rapidly sprint on the flat ground once its on flat ground. The 3 different move sets allow the creature to be very versatile and lets it move rapidly over three different terrain types. Thinking about this is going to help a lot when I start sculpting.

Elona suggested making some test rigs in maya so right now I am going through process of making simple models to go with simple rigs. It is my hope that this will help me refine my idea better before I stat sculpting and I am certain that having a basic idea of how the creature will move before I sculpt it will be incredibly beneficial. I also think this will help me create a more unique creature with an unique unique way of moving. More tomorrow

I made a lot of progress today picking out a head for the first creature. Right now the head is looking like a combination of my previous sketches with some influences from the Camel spider, lizard, and a mantis. Hopefully I can decide on something tommorow and finish the body.

Today I am collecting pictures of animals for reference to use for my sketches. I found the camel spider to have a look (as far as the face goes) that is some what like what I have been drawing. The site Im looking at right now:
http://photo.net/photodb/member-photos?user_id=1783374
has great pictures and I want to see how the drawings I do today respond to these images in particular. Here are some drawings I did yesterday