Making of Hermit Crab

Hello,

I just finished a new personal project 'Hermit Crab'

This time I wanted model organic creature and wanted it to be challenging in material creation. After couple hours of brain teasing, I picked Hermit Crab.

It wasn't the best move after Pixar released their short film 'Piper' which has same creature and environment. But when I started this project, I didn't know there's such thing.

1. Gathering references

I got some cool hermit crab images from mighty google.

There's one particular image that I really like.

This one.

So this was my main reference photo for rest of the project.

Of course I got bunch of other references I didn't upload here. Duh!

2. Modeling

Surprisingly, the hardest part to model was the shell. It looks easy but you gotta think a lot especially where shape goes in.

Maybe I'm just suck at modeling. I don't know. I tend to be extremely lazy when it comes to modeling. I don't hate it. But if there's an easy way to get it done, I'm in.

I use both Zbrush and Mudbox for Sculpting. I remember that I started this shell sculpting in Mudbox and Mudbox failed me extracting displacement map. So I moved to ZBrush and continued.

I always make base mesh in my primary 3D tool (here is Maya) and UV first. And then bring it to ZBrush for sculpting.

ZBrush's Displacement extraction is far better than Mudbox's in both quality and speed.

2. Texturing in Mari

Mari's VrayMtl shader will give you very accurate visual what your textures would look like in render. (of course you should use V-ray for rendering to get that)

Shell texture is mostly hand painted and other body parts are mostly procedural approach.

Multi-tile textures are used but not many. Shell geo has two 4k maps and other body parts have one 4k map each.

3. Environment

When I found out what photogrammetry is, I was hooked.

I wanted to try out and hope I get something out of it.

I grabbed my camera and went to close beach on cloudy day. Thanks to Vancouver, it's always cloudy.

I shoot bunch of photo at the beach and run some tests.

<Photo's used for scanning>

Scanned geometry and texture are mess. I had to retopo it first in Maya with Quad Draw tool.

And then made proper UV for it. Bring Scanned data and low poly mesh into Zbrush, project detail, make displacement map. It worked pretty nicely with almost zero problem.

For textures, I used Mari's map transfer. It worked but Photoscan didn't give me good resolution. I painted here and there to make it look good.

Eventually, I used only partial of scanned geometry. (Tree part)

It was a lot of fun and got some really useful tips for later projects!