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.