Crab Project

I wanted to create a small animal with a lot of detail for this project. I first thought of a tailless whip scorpion, a specific type of spider, but I changed my mind because it could scare or disgust some people, and I did not want to risk that. Then I thought of showing a crab with nice colors and stumbled over horned ghost crabs, which I instantly fell in love with.

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Motive

There are many different types of ghost crabs. Most of them are colored in a very similar way to the sand they live in, since these crabs can change their color to mimic the color of their environment and time of day. The ghost crab I chose would live on the beaches of Diego Garcia and show a beautiful mix of green and orange tones.

Modeling

I started modeling the crab by blocking out the essential shapes to get a feeling for the scale on which I could base all the minor details. For the longest time, I kept working on only one leg, so I could duplicate it once I worked on the retopology.
Next, I added the remaining parts, like the arms, mouth, joints and claws. I hid them to show all other parts more clearly, and worked on finding the first secondary shapes on the torso. In this step, I also duplicated a low poly version of the legs around the body to see the whole silhouette.
I felt as if the crab lacked shapes that were pleasing to look at, and I repeatedly got bored when looking at the many flat edges and dull shapes. So I decided to take a small step away from my reference and rework every part of the crab with nice C and S shapes.
Before I started to work on smaller details, I retopologized the crab. I projected the old mesh on the subdivided new mesh to be able to switch between multiple subdivision levels while sculpting. I also created a palette of brushes to place different bumps all over the crab.

Sand

Sand Grains

I generated the sand grains procedurally and made a second system, where I scattered sand clumps.
Sand Texture

I created the sand texture in Substance Designer and used colors from the sand grains to seamlessly blend from the grains to the texture.

Lighting

To understand what I wanted the scene to look like, I worked on a quick concept lighting scene. I used Blender to make use of its fast render engine and concepting workflow.

I prepared the rendering of my shot with multiple isolated render elements, like diffuse-, specular- and coat-reflections etc., per light, so that I could later rebuild the render in Nuke and precisely control over every single detail in the render.