Create and Render Your Own Creature Design

In this Instructable for intermediate 3D modelers, you'll come up with your own unique creature design, fully rendered in 3D.

Creature design is the art of making fictional animals for stories. Some popular examples of creature design are Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon, Appa from Avatar: The Last Airbender, and practically any other animal you can think of that doesn't exist in real life. Effective creative design supports the story and implies worldbuilding.

As you follow these steps, don't just copy my examples. Come up with your own design restrictions and criteria for your own project. It'll be fun!

If at any point, you feel you need a bit more help in a technical part of the process (like rigging or modeling), feel free to look up tutorials, or watch timelapses to see how other artists tackled similar problems. Forum posts, video tutorials, and even your software's documentation may contain useful information.

Now, let's get started!

Software

1. Digital painting software (Photoshop, Krita, etc.)
2. 3D modeling and texturing software (Blender, Maya, etc.)
3. Digital slideshow software (Google Slides, Canva, etc.)

Also:

1. 3D modeling skills (intermediate)
2. Some drawing skills
3. Basic recognition of animal anatomy (You don't need to know the names of the bones, just which bones in animal skeletons correspond to bones in the human skeleton: they all use the same basic structure.)

The creation of hybrid animals is a big part of creature design. For example, Toothless was based on a panther and bat. Basing your creature design on animals that already exist is a good way to make your design both unique and realistic.

First, you should consider the purpose of your design. Here are some ideas to get you started.

1. What is it for? (A book? Animation? Still render? 3D Print?)
2. What is it used for in its fictional world? (A deadly monster? Livestock? Mount? Pet?)
3. What is the audience? (Children? Young adults? This helps determine the art style.)
4. What emotion should it give off? (Awe? Horror? Comedy? Cuteness?)
5. What is its habitat? (Radioactive lab? Desert? Ocean? Beach? Forest? Underground?)
6. How does it eat? (Stealth hunter? Scavenger? Herbivore? Vampire?)

Next, use the answers to those questions to create a moodboard (image collage) to organize your visual inspiration for your creature design. You can see the moodboard for my creature above.

1. Don't start doomscrolling for the "perfect" reference photos–you do not need them¹.

Third, start thumbnailing! Refer to your moodboard as needed. Here are some things to keep in mind while thumbnailing:

1. Start with just three or five ideas.
2. Make them small and work quickly. Think of the overall shape instead of small details. (Is it curved? Sharp? Blocky? Round?)
3. "Never draw the same thing twice²." In other words, create variation between thumbnails. (Can something be longer? Narrower? Steeper? Bigger?)
4. The best way to test an idea is on paper².
5. When you settle on a body design, you may wish to make drawovers to test details (such as hair types, clothing, or saddles).

1: Fundamentals of Creature Design. 3D Total Publishing: 2020, p14.

2: Marc Taro Holmes, Designing Creatures and Characters. Impact Books: 2016, pp30-31.

Keep in mind your moodboard as you color, but feel free to be creative! You may want to experiment with colors and patterns inspired by real animals, insects, or photographs. You can even create your own color palettes.

1. A bit of color theory knowledge is helpful to chose sets of colors that look good together (such as complementary colors).
2. It's often pleasing to the eye to have a hierarchy in the color palette: that is, a primary color, secondary color, and an accent color.

After you settle on a color palette, you may want to test in against an environment, as shown above. (This does not mean you have to do environment art at this point–you can literally just use a stock photo, like I did, or you can make a rough sketch.)

Next, you should color an orthographic side view of your creature. This will be extremely helpful once you start texturing your 3D model later.

Some artists like to 3D model their characters by sculpting, which is like working with digital clay. I personally prefer to poly-model (individually move vertices of shapes), but either method is perfectly fine. If you're poly-modeling, you may wish to use look into using Blender's subdivision surface modifier to make your model look smoother. If you're sculpting and intend to animate your creature, you may want to look into retopology afterwards to help the computer understand how to deform the model.

Because I did not draw front or back views of my creature, I add relevant front- and back-view photos to my moodboard. Keeping in mind the goals I set in step 1, I choose to look at images and 3D models of deer and horses (for elegance in the face) and wolves and Saluki dogs (for the body shape and legs).

Optional: You can switch the order of steps 4 and 5, if you like, and do rigging before texturing.

Here are some tips for a texturing workflow:

1. When you texture your creature, you can either paint and/or use procedural materials.
2. If you creature has fur, you can either use a hair particle system (for a more realistic rendering style) or mesh hair (for a highly stylized rendering style).
3. Use procedural nodes to create variation in your creature's colors. (For example, my dragon's fur isn't one solid purple.)
4. If you want to make realistic-looking textures, learn how to use PBR materials and rendering.

Now that you have your creature modeled (and maybe textured), it is time to rig. Since rigging is essentially adding bones to a 3D model, a rudimentary knowledge of animal skeletal anatomy is helpful when rigging your creature designs.

For example, wings are modified arms. Many four-legged animals (such as cats, dogs, and horses) have long ankles and walk on their toes. Bears and humans walk flat on their feet. Research as needed.

If you are using Blender, you can use Rigify to create the base of your creature's rig.

You don't have to rig more than you need. My creature does not have a facial rig due to the requirements of my project, but it does have a body, wing, tail, and ear rig. I added damped tracks on the tail and ears to make them a bit floppy when moved.

Posing is my favorite part because we get to see our creatures come to life. It's almost like playing with action figures.

Remember the intentions we set for our designs at the beginning? And the main animals that we decided to reference? Those are important now. Search for images of animals your creature is based on. You can see my pose moodboard above.

I find search queries such as "deer poses," "wolf crouching," and "sparrow landing" to be quite effective for coming up with pose ideas. (Of course, substitute deer, wolf, and sparrow for animals relevant to your creature design.) You may find it helpful to sketch poses based on the images you find. Additionally, you can watch videos (especially slow-motion videos) to see how the real-life animal moves.

Before you do go back into your 3D software to pose the creature's rig, doing these two things will save you a great deal of time:

1. Set up your camera in a static position.
2. Look at the reference image to find the animal's line of motion, which makes its pose look dynamic.

Every creature design can look more epic when it is not only posed, but also has a background.

To create the background for your creature, you can use either 2D images (as shown in the screenshot above) or HDRIs. My favorite place to get them are Canva and Polyhaven. (If you do decide to download HDRIs, make sure to use a reputable source to avoid getting viruses on your computer.)

I use depth of field, make the background image emissive, add fog, and do color correction to make my render more interesting.

Here are final renders from my project.

Great job sticking through to the end! If you continue to practice concept art and 3D modeling, your skills will improve with time. Also, looking at movies' art books and behind-the-scenes is a great way to see how their artists tackled creature design.

Sky backgrounds © Brett Sayles and Olga Niekrasova via Canva.com.

Final renders and concept art © coolkittycat231.