The Odds and Ends #1 Gallery

Some have wondered what would happen if they submitted pieces of art past a gallery's deadline. Up until today we couldn't have told you precisely, however due to a buildup of a few such pieces we finally came up with a solution today.


Welcome to an intern gallery here at ART Evolved, the first odds and ends gallery.


As the old saying goes "better late then never", here are the many pieces that have been sent our way that were a bit past their galleries postings (and deadlines). We apologize to their respective artists for them taking this long to be put up. There was some minor debate within the ART Evolved Executive as to the best way to get them up in a fashion that would be noticed by our sites visitors. Now that we have finalized this as a format they won't be this delayed in the future!

We had two galleries for which late submissions were received...

Here are a few late entries we received for our horned dinosaur gallery. For the original gallery click here.

Einosaurus by Matt Tames

Styracosaurus by Teddy Cookswell

Styracosaurus vs. Daspletosaurus by Teddy Cookswell





Styracosaurus Walk by Teddy Cookswell

Styracosaurus by Brian Blacknick

This is a sculpture of a Styracosaur I was commissioned to make for a stop motion film maker. In his film he is going to have raptors feeding on the thigh area.

We also had several interesting submissions sent in for the...

It would seem the Permian Synapsids capture a great deal of people's alternate reality/past imagination, as there was a submission in the original gallery of a similar speculative nature.

All the following submissions come from ART Evolved's own Raven Amos, and she explains these creations as...

"Years ago, I came up with my own race called the Ghrendali - a race of sentient therapsids that live on a planet orbiting the star Delta Draconis (also known as Altais, Nodus Secundus, or Aldib). I had done several sketches in the past and still don't know what to do with them - in high school, I made a D&D (Second Ed.) module with maps of their planet, custom class descriptions...indeed, I was half-way through with having an entire book dedicated to them in D&D form. Alas, time is not kind and all of that stuff was on a very old computer which inevitably fried before I left for college in 2000. All that's left is their ghosts, echoes of their digital being, trapped until I can create their world anew. Perhaps one day, I will."

Enjoy!

Ghrendali in Colour by Raven Amos



Ghrendali Dancing by Raven Amos

Ghrendali Pensive by Raven Amos

Ghrendali Skull by Raven Amos

Ghrendali Posed by Raven Amos

Making of Karoo Sunset

As you've no doubt noticed ART Evolved has started to be consumed by excitement over the upcoming Pterosaur Gallery. For really good reason too. Pterosaurs have always been a huge icon of prehistory. So be sure to get started on your entry for the gallery today!


However I'd like to return to the Synapsids one more time, before it is nothing but flying reptiles around here ;p


Following Zach and his examination the creation of his own entry, I wanted to similarly share the process behind my own Synapsid piece. Where Zach approaches his with some regret (I personally think he is being too hard on himself, but I know the feeling. We are often our own worst critics!) I come at my own much more pleased.



The piece in question is this, Karoo Sunset. I aimed to have a picture that looked like a snap shot of the life in the day of. Unlike usual though, I actually ended up with something resembling what I'd intended.
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After reading Peter Ward's book Gorgon (my brief review here) I felt inspired by the late Permian and the creatures from then we find in South Africa (the Karoo region in particular). Among the few well known and famous animals of this time and place were the Gorgonopsids, so naturally I wanted to recreate them.
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I had in my mind a scene with a pack of these animals settling at sunset (though there isn't any real evidence I've read about indicating they were social). In that initial imagined state I imagined the piece as a lot more close up and tight then it ended up.
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However despite it "opening up" all the key elements ended up in the final piece. An animal nawing away at the day's kill, youngsters tumbling around in play, several starting to doze off, and a larger adult showing off its freightening teeth in a big yawn.
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Though the scene worked out well, I certainly didn't have a plan that lead me to this end product. In fact to be honest I mostly fluked my way there...



Of course the first step was to build a Gorgonopsid. As I work almost exclusively in 3D CG, I'm quite literal when I say build.
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I was thinking about ART Evolved while building my Gorgon's head (the first thing I tend to build on any animal), and so documented nearly every major modelling step I took to create the skull and jaw. You'll find it all compiled into this little slideshow.
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This was in total about 45min to an hour of work. It is kind of depressing that it all compresses into 30 seconds so easily...
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Sadly Gorgonopsids being Synapsids have fairly boring skulls from a construction point of view. They don't have the fun holes and openings of reptilian skulls like Dinosaurs. So if people find this animation neat I'll record the next Dinosaur I build so you can see how a more complicated build comes together.

This one had only one minor 3Ding drama, that being the eye placement. You can see me correct this around 21 seconds.


Anyways with the beast built now I needed to texture it...

This ended up being the most difficult phase in the end.



My first problem was I couldn't decide on what I wanted it to look like. Was it going to be scaly with just some tuffs of fur, or was it going to have a big woolly coat.
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In the end due to my embarassing attempts at scales with tuff of fur, I opted for just a hair covering.
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With just a hair covering, creating the baseline model texture was stupid easy. Just this simple brown with black random lines, to simulate a base coat of fur, done on a much larger scale.


However this basline was going to need some 3D fur to make it looking convincing. Enter the HUGE problem. Fur...

Now as readers of my other blogs know, I've been doing a lot of feathered theropods lately, and these have really brought some of my 3D Dinos up to a new level. However you'll also find that despite my love of them in the the final product, feathers (and in this case fur, which is just a slightly different application of the same process) are the bane of my existence!
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This was among my first attempts at applying hair to my Gorgon... A very cool effect (one I'll be stealing for any woolly animal galleries we do here in the future ;p) but certainly not a realistic looking Gorgon!

Why the crazy non-fur looking fur?
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I'm using a feature of Carrara called Surface Replication. In it I select any smaller objects (in this case the different individually modelled hairs you see floating above the Gorgon) that I want copied along the surface of a larger object (in this case the various parts of the Gorgon). This feature in theory is incredibly handy, as you can make up to 10 000 copies of the smaller shapes with this utility. Individually placing and modelling that many hairs would take me months (and I just won't do it!).
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However sadly it isn't as easy as you'd hope. There are a number of factors making it difficult. The size of the hair in comparison to the body ended up being a critical issue, and one I'd hit in a really hard way putting my scene together... I'll get back to that soon.

The thing that bugs me the most about this application is that whoever programmed this feature didn't think about the orientation controls. In theory the fur on my beast should align to the master object (again floating about the Gorgon), however somewhere in the math of this process all the X, Y, and Z attributes swap. Meaning that how I align my fur in the "real" world isn't how they align on the creature.
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Which is why he appears so shaggy in these early attempts. Fur (or feathers) that stick out make your critter look unkept and unhealthy. So it'd be nice to have intuitive control on these things to slick them back...
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So after playing with the size to body ratio, and the orientation of my fur...
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I finally got this final version (well okay close to final. I didn't save a shot like this of the final final model).

I went for mostly subtle sized hair, but a larger thicker "mane" around the neck. In this pic it doesn't look so good (as it is also one version before my final one), but in the final piece the manes on the adults worked.

Next I came to where I was going to stick my critters for the scene. The Karoo 250 million years ago was a semi arid desert. Once it'd been a lovely productive forest, but with the number of converging geologic factors caused by the formation of Pangea, the world was slowly being turned into a giant desert...
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This meant that I didn't just need a desert shot, but due to my desire for a sunset, a desert in sunset. As I didn't have any photos that matched this description, it meant I was going to have to construct my own location in 3D.

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Though it was a lot more work then my usual compositing (which is work in and of itself). This would take me a week. However the control this gave me over lighting every element contributed to the awesomeness of the end product.

Building the desert itself ended up being rather straight forward. I went for a mesa valley, containing an increasingly rare lake.
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Where the terrian was trickiest (other then scaling the landscape to match my Gorgons... but that's in a moment) was lighting it. If you compare this early test render to the last, you'll see my conundrum. Sunsets generate a beautiful range of yellows, oranges, and reds. The question is which of these did I want my scene dominated by.
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The other complication in this was how many different lights was I going to need?

In 3D scenes the lighting is completely up to the modeller, and there isn't just one type of light that fixes all.
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I'll probably at some point do a full tutorial on 3D lighting (as I've been learning a lot about it this year), but here is roughly how I lite the scene and solved the color problem.

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In the end the Karoo ended up with 5 lights. The first one is obvious, and one in the real world you'd expect. There is a great feature in Carrara that not only generates the 3D sun you see in the scene, but allows you to make it a light source that mimics properties of real sunlight (such as the colour, brightness, and even clouds... all of these changing on how you position the sun in the sky... so in this case it helped set a baseline sunset lighting).

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However if you think about this position of the sun to my subjects, they'd all be backlite and thus nothing more then silouettes. The other issue I had was with shadow casting.

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To solve the Shadow issue (and a bit of my backlighting issue) I created a general "bulb" light directly above the sun (just above the top frame in the final render) that cast a bright yellow light. Bulb lights work just like a uncovered light bulb, they cast light in every direction.

This first bulb was to lighten up the whole scene, and thus help increase the contrast of the shadows. Due to its better angle I made this my central shadow casting light so all the shadows in this scene aren't strictly scientific from a physics point of view :P.

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This however made the scene too bright. To darken it back down , and yet better light the objects (if that makes sense) from viewers point of view I created a dark red bulb that I placed directly behind the camera. In essence where the picture was taken from.

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This lit the scene perfectly, but the Gorgons were still very dark. To fix this I created a lighter red light that was set to only light the creatures (and their fur! Which I missed in first couple passes at the scene). This is a fun benefit of 3D light, unlike real light, you can make it effect only things of your choosing!

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My last light was for a subtle, but needed effect, and that was the glisten of the uneaten meat on the carcass. This was a nearly white "spot" light, as the pure white mixed with my other scene lights nicely. Spotlights can be thought of as like either a real spot light, or metaphorically like a flashlight. It shot a beam straight ahead of it whereever you point it, but that's it. Only things in that line get lite. In this case just the meat objects on the skeleton.

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All the individual elements were ready. It was finally time to put them together.

When I hit yet another fur related problem! Which you can see here.

Fur and other surface replicators have another annoying catch. Once you've created them if you change the size of the recipiant object (in this case I had to make the Gorgon smaller, so I shrunk its body parts) the fur doesn't change size to match!

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I'd modelled the desert on the scale of 200 units long by 200 units wide. My Gorgon was 40 units long. Meaning it was quite large in what should have been a large desertscape. Attempting to shrink my Gorgon caused this fun fur effect...

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At least my nice lighting obscurred how dumb it is!

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After rescaling the landscape to an impressive 3000 by 3000 units (anymore then that and my lighting won't work... though this week I have a new means to light even a million by million object!) I had to readjust the lighting a bit. Due to the shift in the sun (to get it back over the now taller horizon) the colour shifted a bit, and I couldn't quite get it back. Oh well.

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To increase the feel of realism I decided to make a swarm of flies and shrubs scattered aross the scene. These were accomplished like fur (the flies a slight varation, but not worth going into so close to the end).

The last thing I had to do was import Gorgons (sadly one by one) position, pose, and light them. This took a long time just due to the computational requirments of so many 3D objects.

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It all came to together as this. Hopefully as you've seen with the errors I documented (and the dozens of others I neglected to document) that though this piece is really awesome, I didn't directly set out knowing I'd get it this way.

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However this first immersive lesson in lighting has me looking at this factor a lot lately, and I will probably be able to set out for similar effects in the future.

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What I'm most proud of is that the multi layered lighting has accidentally mimicked the look of a painting. If you can't enlargen this version here is an enlargened version for a closer up look. This is the closest I've ever come to emulating my childhood hero Charles Knight... Now if only I could actually be as good as him :P

The Long Road to Failure

A long, long, long time ago, my buddy Will Baird (of the Dragon’s Tales) suggested collaborating on an interesting spec project: the alternate Permian, a place where the Permio-Triassic extinction never happened (or at least happened much slower) and non-mammalian synapsids came to rule the world instead of reptilian archosaurs. This idea intrigued me, but it also intimidated me—I knew virtually nothing about those critters. We focused first on developing a neodicynodont that we lovingly called the “walrodont” because it converged on walruses. Here’s the initial skeletal I did so long ago.

The walrodont went through more changes than any other creature in our bestiary, as I was never convinced it could be real. Many versions exist, but only a few survive. We also collaborated on some more neodicynodonts illustrating a host of semi-aquatic roles. These included the compact, big-headed hippodont; the lithe, long-toed desmodont; and the transitional form between those two, the sirenodont. You can see the desmodont and hippodont here. The sirenodont is in PDF form so I've gotta...work that one out. It's not bad, let's say that.

We initially focused on a few other critters too, namely what the gorgonopsids would be doing. I suggested they would evolve into dog and bear roles, and this shaggy, amphicyonoid critter came out of that idea. Notice the prominent canines. Gorgons already have big ol’ canines, but I liked the idea that they would become hypertrophied in at least a few species. Big canines are a consistent theme in synapsid evolution.

Will said it was too furry (I agreed), and I thought the anatomy looked forced. I decided to make it sleeker and less furry, with an emphasis on pectoral musculature so the beastie could pin down its prey before delivering the death blow. This is the sketch that followed those new rules, along with a juvenile Dromaeosuchus, or sprint-o-croc, another Alt-Permian beastie. I realized that the “ursonopsid” (as we were calling it) looked more like a barbourofelid nimravid, so I started calling it the “barbouronopsid.”

We decided that this particular barbouronopsid would chase down the beach-loving desmodonts and sirenodonts, but what ate the walrodont? Well, how about a big marine hovasaur? Hovasaurs are basal diapsids with long, webbed feet and dorsoventrally expanded tails. I took an average-sized hovasaur and made it longer, and gave it orca colors because orcas are awesome. These would be the key players in the Art Evolved piece. I started with this sketch:

I used the power of Photoshop for the rest. This process went through several troubled stages. I went into this project with the goal of creating a piece without outlines, and while I succeeded in that effort, it’s clearly something I need to practice.

I modeled the landscape (OMG—context!) after a cliffside beach near my house. The final picture was supposed to have a little Euparkeria-type archosaur eating a shellfish, but there wasn’t really enough room. I have no idea what Permian vegetation looks like, but Will consulted me there, thus the giant fern-things on the top of the bluff, and the weird seaweed towers in the water. And look at those crinoids! I purposefully used big, exaggerated strokes on the crinoids. My goal was to make them look a bit “out of focus,” but because I don’t know how to use Photoshop, I don’t think that’s how it looks.

The water was modeled after Wind Waker. In fact, the whole goddamn piece was supposed to have a Wind Waker color scheme to it, but it just looks wierd and incomplete. So there you have it, folks: the long road to an EPIC FAIL. Definately not one of my best pieces, though I learned a lot by doing this, so that's...some consolation. I guess.

The Synapsid Gallery

Welcome to...

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Though we often picture modern reptiles as being primitive among vertebrates, this couldn't be further from the truth. The majority of reptiles we see living around us today are the highly diverged and specialized products of millions of years of evolution of the reptilian form. If one traces the reptile family tree back to its roots, you'd hardly recognize most of the earliest forms to claim membership in this group.

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Among some of the strangest of these early reptiles were the Synapsids. Not only were they bizarre creatures compared to modern animals, but even more bizarre they are closest related to today's mammals rather than other reptiles.

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At the same time, this is not to say that most of them are our direct ancestors. They are rather a major offshoot off the reptilian tree that branched out into an amazing array of diversity as the most successful land animals of their era, only to be devastated and cut down by major extinctions to a few lone twigs. One of these surviving twigs would eventually manage to sprout into a new branch of diversity, our own lineage the modern mammals.

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The true heyday of the Synapsids was the Permian, in which they dominated nearly every terrestrial ecosystem and niche in the manner we are used to with dinosaurs or mammals. During this time they evolved into all shapes and sizes, ate plants and meat (or a combination of both), and conquered many environments for the first time by vertebrates.

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Despite being less known then Dinosaurs, they were in every way as amazing (though very different and unique in their own ways!). They too evolved all manner of odd ornamentation ranging from sail backs, to elaborate horns and crests, small heads, and even the first ever sabre teeth. Though they would not match the colossal size of the Dinosaurs, these primitive "stem-mammals" would achieve sizes that match those of many of today's largest land animals, and were the first to ever reach such sizes.

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If not for the combination of a number of devastating geologic processes and events at the end of the Permian period 250 million years ago they may very well have flourished and prospered longer. However they would nearly be completely extinguished by the worst mass extinction of earth's history.

Despite this tragic end they are far from forgotten today. So come back with us, back 250 million or more years to once again witness our strange relatives...

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Lobalopex mordax by Zach Miller

Caesids by Zach Miller

Moschops by James Robins

This is drawn from this angle to get a feeling for its peculiar sprawling stance and huge body. The only extant comparison of a creature approaching this size, but nothing like the bulk, would be the Komodo Dragon, which after all spends a lot of time resting its body on the ground.

Dicynodont QMF15.990 by James Robins

A reconstruction of the as yet un-named Dicynodont QMF15.990, from Cretaceous deposits in Queensland, Australia....yes Cretaceous.....!!!

Bathygnathus borealis by Steven Francis-Coombs

Here's what remains of Bathygnathus borealis, with an outline of its skull (speculative). The one and only specimen represents a sphenacodontid synapsid. It was originally described as the lower jaw, but it turned out later that it was part of the upper jaw. It was discovered on Prince Edward Island.

Sunset on the Karoo by Craig Dylke

A pack of Gorgonopsids settle in for the night, as twilight creeps over Permian South Africa 249 mya.

This picture was composed completely from 3D CG in the program Carrara. This scene gains much from being viewed in a larger version.
There will be "a making of" post about this piece appearing on ART Evolved soon.

Cotylorhynchus Romeri by Rachael Revelle

Whilst Cotylorhynchus could grow to 6 metres in length and weighed up to 2 tons it had a disproportionately small head.

Lycaenops ornatus by Sean Craven

The Xeno-Permian by Zach Miller

A look at a world where Synapsids didn't go extinct 250 million years ago...

Proto-Mammal Fallacy by Glendon Mellow

The Hunt By Nima Sassani

A pack of Inostrancevia take down a Scutosaurus.

Estemmenosuchus by Peter Bond

Gorgonopsid by Peter Bond

Dimetrodon milleri by Peter Bond

Dimetrodon milleri by Peter Bond

 Vananops brevirostris by David Tana

Varanops brevirostris, one of the last surviving pelycosaurs from the early Late Permian. 

Pen on paper, scanned, colored in Adobe Photoshop






Submissions for the Synapsid gallery will still be taken, but due to formatting issues caused by blogger, will be posted in buddles of five. So be sure to get yours in sooner then later to guranteed a spot in the first updates.

Our next gallery will be the flying reptiles, the Pterosaurs. Try to have your entry in by July 1st! Also be sure to "soar" by to check out the entries for this gallery...