[Sol_Arcana]

So from the looks of it I'm pretty late to the party (and out classed) on this one, but the worst that can happen is that I make a fool out of myself right?

Decided to stall on making my thread until I was confident I was going to actually enter this contest so I'll be starting the actual model later today. For now though, here's some sketches I've done of my little made up creature. With the exception of a name I've actually thought up a codex entry for this species, but now that I'm thinking about it that seems a bit beyond the scope of the contest so I'll keep that to myself for now. No color/texture yet, that part of the process always seems to give me a lot of grief so I'll be thinking of it as I model, should have a colored version of the thing ready to post before December's out.

[Sol_Arcana]

Well it looks like I forgot all about the WIP thread, and it seems to have deleted my old attachments too. I'll go ahead and post up the left over files I still have.

I was initially working under the assumption that I was incredibly out classed by the rest of the artists around here (which turned out to be a pretty good assumption), so I needed to make something that would be largely unique to my imagination to stand any chance. Since there aren't many lizard like creatures that I can think of in Mass Effect I figured that would be a good place to start.

Initially it was going to be a lizard/insect hybrid, perhaps with some human like features as well to make it a sort of Frankenstein's monster, maybe an early Reaper experiment from previous cycles. The more I drew though the more like a bipedal lizard it turned into though, so I decided to run with it and take more influence from lizards and dinosaurs. As for its back tentacle arm-like appendages, I plan on animating him eventually and thought that one of them drunk with their tentacle arms flopping around would be funny. That and there's something just off putting about arm like things sprouting out of a creature anywhere other than what I can easily identify as a shoulder which is also why his knees are reverse jointed, it's just different enough from a person to weird me out. Since he's a monster/robot/husk/zombie like thing, all of that seemed appropriate.

[Sol_Arcana]

Unfortunately it looks like I've already deleted the earliest stages of the model. If anyone is interested though, I can tell you the hardest part for me was remembering that all the neat features I wanted him to have required me to model out things that didn't make any sense from a still image perspective. That and Mudbox. Me and Mudbox don't seem to get along.

[Sol_Arcana]

And the last renders. Also, this is the first time I've ever posted any creation that I've remotely cared about so I'm not sure how to properly go about watermarking and the like. I saw some of the other artists place little copyright notices in their images and figured that was a good idea, I apologize if I'm being excessive with it.