This is a special piece to me because I had a bad experience with a cast of crabs years ago. I used this as an opportunity to better understand crabs and to rewrite my experience with them. The goal was to create the best-looking Blue Crab I could. For this project I bought a live crab so I could get a better understanding of the Blue Crabs anatomy and to take high quality pictures of the crab for texturing in Mari 3D. I spent about 4 weeks sculpting the crab and 2-3 weeks making the first pass.
Craig The Blue Crab
Composting Passes
Turntable
Wire frame AND UV's
REFERENCES
I spent majority of my time painting the crabs' textures in Mari 3D by projection painting and created alphas to represent certain patterns in the crab. I mixed different colors to achieve the look I wanted and focused on textures for tertiary details such as little bumps. Here is what the nodes looked like for the shell.
Bonus
After creating the crab, the best way to push it further was to rig and animate it. I rigged the crab and worked with my friend Serenna Colligan who is an animator to make sure the crab rig worked well when she animated it.
