Triceratops WIP (Patreon)

I did a bunch of modeling and stuff on the triceratops yesterday. I've approached this model in a more "traditional" workflow, at least in these modern times. So I began by doing a sculpt of the head. I didn't sculpt it by hand the usual way, but instead made it out of simple forms first, used the remesh modifier, applied it and then did some real sculpting on top of it. It's not very detailed, but that's because it doesn't really have to be!

Then I modeled the head on top of it.

The big advantage of sculpting the head in this way is being able to focus mostly on edge loop flow over complex surfaces. My topology is by no means perfect, but what I find most important to animation is clean edge loops around the mouth, eyes and eyebrows are very important to get right! I'll know how good or bad it is when I try to animate some expressions with him.

I sculpted a body with a similar method as the head, but in smaller chunks. The arms, lower legs and tail were meshes made out of simpler shapes, remeshed, then sculpted on a bit.

Once again it doesn't have to be perfect, just enough to get an idea of how the edge loops will flow across the mesh, and enough to suggest some muscle groups. I'm not terribly good at my anatomy, and it shows here... but I don't want "perfection" or "realism" but stylization that suggests a muscular physique on a stylized dinosaur.

Here's the body retopolgized:

The tail hole and junk I didn't sculpt because I find that much easier and simpler to straight up polygon model, but those will be added soon. Also, for the hands, I decided to re-use the hands from the brontosaurus model.

*note a weird edge loop on the index finger, I had to add that to attach it cleanly to the body :p*

I wanted to reuse his hands because I thought they turned out really well and deformed really nicely. Plus, I don't imagine the triceratops' hands looking too different than this- maybe pointier claws, but still the same kind of "stubbiness" or "meatiness"'

You'll notice he looks pretty unamused in the banner image, but this is because I haven't rigged the eyelids yet. So he's stuck with his default squinting eyelids:

Another interesting thing about the eyes is I broke out the boolean-eyeball trick I've used in several models before. Sometimes, to get the right eye shape, the eyeball has to be very large, so much that it pokes out from the top of the head. To fix it, you can just use a boolean shape parented to the main head bone so that the unwanted eye parts are always cut away.

Finally, I've been doing some rigging as I get more of his body done. I want to have some really natural deformation on his chest, and used my usual methods of having the shoulder track to a bone attached to the wrist.

I thought of another trick for the shoulder and chest helper bones- sometimes, you want them to move a bit with another bone, but not completely. The green bones copy the transforms of the grey bones but at a lower influence. 

That's it for now on the triceratops! I should have the more interesting bits done pretty soon.