Final 3D Stamp

So I finaly finished my 3D stamp of my Crab, this took me around 8 hours over 2 days (just for the crab) and about 2 hours to sort out the scenery, here is a render of the final outcome.

This render shows my crab standing in a shallow area of water on the edge of a sandy hill.

Now a breif step buy step of how I got the scenery and how the crab came to be.

I will begin with how I created the scenerey.

I started buy created a Plane 1000x1000

I then had to make my landscape so buy selecting soft selection I selected the vertex's and began moving things around untill I was happy with the shape, I then turbosmoothed, I then made the land look more realistic buy adding a "Map Scaler Binding" modifier, this allowed me to select the sides of the lands and move them in and out to make a more random natural scene, here is a render of my landscape.

Next I had to add material to the landscape I done this buy chooseing two pictures off the internet, one being grass the other of sand, I had an image in mind of creating a hillish scne with a sandy shoreline.

Using the "TOP/BOTTOM" Map created the material, this was done buy setting "Blend" to 5 and "Position" to 98, For the top material I added the grass picture to the diffuse map and the bottom material added the sand to the diffuse map, I then applied this to the landscape and this render shows my final choice after a little tweaking.

As you can see the land protudes from the lowest area of the plane where there needs to be water, so my next course of action was to create water, I did this buy creating a second plane and putting it just above the lowest point around the edges of the riased bits, I then turned this completly black, turned the shader to "blinn" and then changed the Specular leval to 0 and Glossiness to 10 and left soften as 0.1, I then ch anged the Self-Illumination to 0 and Opacity to 100, after i did this I added two map's, The first being BUMP-"NOISE" to give the water texture and the second map was REFLECT - "FLAT MIRROR" this would reflect the sky scenery which gives the water a realistc look, the sky scenerey was another picture found on the internet and put onto another plane which then was rotated 90 degree's and placed behind my landscape.

After a bit of tweaking my render finaly turned out at I had hoped and this is what I got.

I was now happy with my scenery and was ready to make a start on my crab.

For the crab I started with a simple box and change it to an Editable Polygon, then selcting the vertex's and soft solection I moved it around to get my desired shape, I then turbosmoothed and renderd to make sure it was the right shape,

this was the first render of my crab, I then did the same for the bottom half of the crab to create the body, they both had bend modifiers added to them and the bottom half had a small area extruded upwards to seal the back of the crab.

I then put these two parts together and began on the leg's, these were very simple and same as my bug idea, using sphere's and cylinders to create crab like leg's these were bent moved and extruded to make a more realistic group of leg's, Then at the end of the legs I had to add the "feet" these are simply spikes crabs use to move along land, this was done buy creating a seperate cone and bending to make a more natural look, after I done the main legs I had to do the two back legs of my crab, these would be the legs the crab would primarily use to propell itself through water, these were created the same way as the normal leg's but also had two smal "flippers" at the back, these were created using a cone that was then (using the bend modifer) bent on the Y axis to get the flat look. here is my render of the leg's.

After I was happy with my leg's it was time to create the "Teeth" and claw's for the crab, these were quite easy to make, the claws consited of 3 cylinder's to make up the main arm that were soft selected to create a bumpy look, then I added 2 seperate "Pincer's" to each arm using cones which were bent into shape.

The "Teeth" were created simply buy creating a box and extruding out at a 40 degree angle, Turbo smooth was added to these and once happy was ready to make the eyes, which were simple 2 Sphere cut in half.

here are the renders of the claw's, teeth and eyes.

After each part was made I had to assemble the Crab, this was simply time consuming moving each part into place, once I was happy with the crab It was time for material's for the main body, legs claws and teeth I found a picture on the internet and used that alongside a UVW Map moved it into a nice position, and finaly for the eye's I use s jet black colour with a red tint specular to create the colour of the crab's eye's.
Here is the final render of my crab



Thanks for Reading

AJ