Early Human

Man's place in nature? We evolved like most other organisms... Here we have one of our early forms... Very early... Although it could also be an early chicken... At some point way back in time we may actually have been related. Primordial soup and all. It was a pretty happening place.

The topic got me thinking of an image I saw before. So unfortunately this isn't exactly a completely original idea. We evolved, or that's what I believe, and wanted to make something a little light hearted on what one of the links in the evolution chain that would eventually become human. Absolutely no basis in science whatsoever.

Inspiration pic and plugin used.

The above link holds a small picture of the inspiration done by Wayne Kilgore. I think Wayne did a bit better job of it. Love the overall expression/eyes. So I tried to mimic it.

The main 'character' is created in Carrara using box modelling and subdivision surfaces. Basically a bunch of extruding and simple rotations and translations. The purple plant things and the spiky ball thing were done exactly the same way. Shading was using 'Fake Fresnel' which is part of shader ops from the above link. It's a add on plugin for Carrara. The plants were twisted and bent using a scene modifier that comes standard with Carrara to make them look different from each other.

The surface that they are sitting on was rendered to a 1024x1024 bitmap using some 'noise' like 3D texture. The bitmap was used as a terrain map for the floor so that it has some 'relief' to it and so that the fresnel shader would actually do something.

Textures are all pretty much the same. In Carrara terms, a mixed shader where the mixer is the fresnel effect. The top shader of the mix is a simple color no Alpha, some Highlight and Specular but I don't think they've added anything. Some glow. Bottom shader is black with a lot of alpha. Again some highlight and specular but again, I don't think it added anything really. No bump mapping or anything else.

Ambient light is 0. Depth of field is set on. Very little anti-aliasing was needed. No light refraction. There are shadows but they are hard to see. The objects have some 'glow' to them so that they aren't completely black in shadow. One light bulb at 200% intensity.

Paint Shop Pro to make the thumbnail and for signing the picture only.

It's a very simple scene technically, but it was pretty fun to make.