Manta Serpent

This project's goal is bringing to life a concept I made in 2022 of a Manta Ray Serpent creature that can be found in the shallows alongside other rays. I took it as an opportunity to really dive into rigging in blender; I made everything in this project, from the creature sculpt, to the rig and animations.

programs used:

Serpent Rig

face controls

The entire rig has an IK and FK switch, as well as a separate switch for just the facial controls.

Rig driven motion

The most prominent feature of this rig is its fluid rig driven motion. Most bones have damped track controls that follow the bone in front of them; which I fine-tuned with rotation constraints and altering the influence of individual tracks.

I also added controls to affect the influence of automatic motion, which can be keyframed to be off or lessened for specific areas of the rig.

Body Controls

The rig also has full FK and IK controls to animate manually.

High vs low

I made sure to retain as much of the silhouette and edge creases as possible during retopology

Retopology

10 million tris to 40k tris. The serpent could easily get lower LODs as well, but I chose to keep a higher number of edge loops- especially along the body- to allow for smoother snaking deformation.

Teeth normals

The teeth and gum mesh were made separately from the rest of the sculpted creature. To blend in the gums to the mouth, their normals are averaged with the mouth mesh and then certain edges are hardened to help retain their shape.

UVs

Textures

Initial Concept

I drew the initial concept for the Manta Serpent in 2022.

I decided to go a little more realistic with the Manta Ray wing elements, making them thinner and sharper than the initial concept.