My Mardini 2025 Process: Day 7 (Patreon)

Back again for another Mardini submission! The prompt today was "Creature."

Concept

Right away I had the idea to make a fossilized skeleton. My first draft involved an excavation of a dinosaur. There would be a dirt wall, the skeleton partially revealed, some tools on the ground and a shop light illuminating the scene.

This idea fell out of favor as I ran into the annoying task of creating good-looking dirt in a short period of time. I decided to move the scene to a museum to keep things simple. I started creating the dinosaur and soon thought to make it a true "creature" with a combination of a lot of different elements. In the end it turned into a lobster insect dog dinosaur demon!

I thought the velvet rope was a cute touch that not only added scale but also a bit of surrealism. I imagined the museum curators being concerned about people getting too close to the 20 foot high lobster demon.

Creating Assets

The poles holding the rope were easy, just a few tubes and bevels. I actually simulated the rope with Vellum to get a perfect drape, although that was way overkill. Would have been fine to just draw a curve! It's a simple remeshed tube with both ends pinned and high stiffness and drag to keep it from bouncing around.

The rock surface that holds the fossil is a grid with a bunch of noises applied via the Mountain node. There are a couple nice rock-like noises, with Worley Cellular F1 being particularly great. I did all the large and medium scale details this way, saving the tiny details for a final displacement pass in render.

Lobster demon time! This made heavy use of Sculpt nodes. I based each part on remeshed boxes, then sculpted, remeshing as needed to redistribute the topology evenly. All in all things came together pretty quickly. I spent the majority of the time positioning bones and getting the look of the horns and skull right.

When everything was ready I got all the elements into position and sculpted the rock into shape, covering some of the bones in a natural-looking way.

Scene Assembly and Rendering

I brought all the finished geometry into Solaris with SOP Imports, as usual. The floor is a quick and easy Greyscalegorilla wood texture. I used a ton of Mtlx Unified Noise 3D on the rock and skeleton to break up the color and roughness, and create subtle high frequency displacement. This noise node is an excellent tool. The skeleton has no UVs (they would have been a disaster anyway when working this quickly), so projecting procedural 3D noise is a perfect solution. I was very happy with how easy it was to get a nice result.

The lights are nothing fancy, just area lights positioned to the left, right, top and front. I wanted to get a very bright, modern, sterile museum-like look.

Two down, we'll see which prompt catches my interest next!