Mid-Term: Project Cricket

For my mid-term project, I chose to do a figure that was small enough so as to allow me enough time to complete it fully, but had enough possibility for detail and interpretation as well (to keep it interesting!). I did a similar form earlier with the fish (though, these are two completely separate projects), but I decided to do a more refined version with a different animal.

This is the beginning of my cricket; it's a bit hard to see so I wish I had taken a more decent shot of it from different angles. Initially, I had just been playing around with NURBS primitives but one of the shapes I was working on (this would go on to become the body) inspired me to go with an adapted cricket form (it's not entirely accurate to what a cricket should look like). Since I prefer organic forms, a lot of my work will lean towards things found in nature or people, as opposed to more rigid structures (not including my earlier projects with the bed and the rocket ship).

Here's the rendered still of the cricket, as it looks in it's final incarnation.

In regards to things that I would improve on, I do think more accurate lighting would be better, as many of the fine details such as the wings and the antennae get lost against the dark background. Additionally, I had animated the head to swivel back and forth. Unfortunately, for some reason I wasn't able to render the scene out as a Quicktime clip, so the animation is not shown here yet. I do hope to be able to post the fully animated cricket eventually, so perhaps for the next post I will have that up and running.

Another part I would be interested in working on would involve the creation of my own texture/skin for figures. Though I am fairly satisfied with the way the cricket's skin turned out, I think more variation in the color or roughness would add to its depth.