Process Log 10: The Temple Guardian

Here's the process I went through in creating the Temple Guardian, informally known as Sherlock after watching several episodes of the BBC show dubbed the same name. :'D This was a character I worked on for senior thesis with Erica Berman. More process of our project can be found here: http://metalmelon.blogspot.com/

The initial idea I had for Sherlock was a monster plant that had a decoy to lure it's prey. It essentially had two bodies, one immobile that was rooted to the ground that acted as the lure, and the main body that sprouted out of the lower body.

Explored various types of heads for the main body. Two of my main references were deepsea fish and kabuto beetles.

This was the final turnaround and silhouette test for Sherlock.

Some modeling WIP:

Then I came across a pretty big problem. As I was modeling the lower body, I realized that the decoy's design looked too intimidating, thus driving anything that would've been lured away. After receiving crits from colleagues and faculty, it was set in stone that I had to go back and fix the head of Sherlock's lower body.

Referring back to the pencil sketches above, I did some more exploration of some cuter decoy heads. I ended up going with a simple flower head with no lure.

Coming up with a cohesive color scheme was also another challenge I ran into when I made the adjustments to the lower body. The third iteration in the image above was the concept I ended up using. Here's the cool reference that inspired the color scheme:

(Huernia piersii)

And here is the final model with all its textures:

Update: Sherlock in context