Pachycephalosaurus Skeleton

I've been working on this reconstruction of Pachycephalosaurus for the past few weeks. I've finally gotten the skeleton to a place I feel comfortable moving forward with.

Most of my time went into  working on the cervical and dorsal vertebrae and the ribs.  I wasn't initially planning on sculpting these at all.  I usually treat the cervical, dorsal and caudal vertebrae as very simple structures, using a primitive forms to represent the general size and shape of the rib cage, and vertebrae. I used to cringe at the idea of having to sculpt each vertebrae individually, especially considering that I was going to cover it all with muscle and skin anyway.

However I came across a couple cool techniques, thanks to Ryan Kingslien and his Artistic Anatomy in Zbrush course at Uartsy.  He had a process that made sculpting the vertebral columns and ribs in humans seem very manageable.  I decided to try and apply the techniques I learned to my skeleton of Pachycephalosaurus.   There were some adjustments I had to make to get everything to work correctly, and as I said it still took a good chunk of time to get everything in place, mostly because dinosaurs have many more vertebrae than humans do.  In the end, I was able to tackle the vertebrae and ribs without having my head explode which is a really good thing.

I may decide to take this further and make the skeleton it's own sculpture, or I may stop working on the skeleton and begin focusing on a flesh reconstruction.  I'm not too sure at the moment so I guess we'll see where it goes from here.   

T-Rex Ecorche

I did this mostly as a test of a new digital painting and sketching program I picked up recently called Clip Studio Paint.  I needed some subject matter to sketch, so I chose to draw a dinosaur and get some studying in at the same time. 

I started with a sketch of a T-Rex skeleton based on a photo.  I decided that I'd go ahead and add the muscle and flesh layers on top of it.  I've become more and more obsessed with finding information on dinosaur muscles since I've started sculpting them more frequently.  I've found that it can be pretty hard to find good references for them.  There are a couple really great drawings, that I use often, by Scott Hartman and Gregory S. Paul that helped a lot with this sketch.

Overall this was a pretty fun exercise, and I absolutely love Clip Studio Paint.  I was able to jump in and get sketching pretty quickly.  It's close enough to Photoshop, as far as menus and things go, that I didn't have to fumble around too much to get to the tools and options I wanted.  The brushes perform beautifully and have such a natural feel.  I especially like the colored pencil brush. I think its definitely replaced Photoshop as my favorite digital sketching tool.  I have to experiment more with the painting side of things, but I've heard good things about it from friends and co-workers.  I'm really excited to continue experimenting with the program. 
   

Anhanguera Santanae

This is my reconstruction of Anhanguera santanae, based on skeletal and anatomical information from John Conway, Julia Molnar, and Mike Habib.  I've also included a few shots of the preparation I did for a 3D print of this model, and some pictures of the final 3d Prints I received from Shapeways and Sculpteo.   

 

Claws of the Southern Hunter

A reconstruction of the forelimbs of Australovenator Wintonensis based on the type specimen AODF 604.  This was originally intended to be a quick study,  however it became a lot more involved than I had anticipated.

Banjo (Australovenator Wintonensis)

I've been working on this reconstruction of Australovenator for a while. Australovenator is an Australian therapod dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous. This particular specimen was nicknamed Banjo after Banjo Patterson. This is a head shot of the full body sculpt I hope to complete soon. 

This is a quick breakdown showing how I created the final render. The final image was composed of individual render passes created using Zbrush.  I then used Photoshop to composite the renders using various blending modes, masking and a bit of paint.  

 

The final image was featured in Prehistoric Times Magazine Issue 108 last winter.  I have to give a big thank you to Mike Fredricks of Prehistoric Times for including my image in the issue.

Gorgosaurus Mother

This is the grayscale painting done from one of the thumbnails in the previous post.  Hope to add color soon.

Gorgosaurus Thumbnails

These are a bunch of preliminary drawings for an illustration of Gorgosaurus that I had intended to submit to Prehistoric Times.  I was focusing illustrating the scenes that showed the dinosaurs feeding habits.  There are more than a few theories as to how Gorgosaurus and other Tyrannosaurs fed.  Were they solitary or pack hunters, scavengers, did they chase their prey down or were they ambush predators? So I tried to do at least one thumbnail corresponding to each theory. I also explored some ideas involving behavior pertaining to raising and caring for their young.