You reap what you sow

 Hello,

Just coming back for a little update about WKTB.

I had a great talk at the Framed festival in Groningen. It was my first talk ever so I was really dreading that and it went OK, after the presentation lots of people came by to say that it was interesting to see my film come to life. It was supercool to hear and gave me the confidence to do such a thing again.

After all the work of making WKTB
it it was time for sending it to festivals. Festivals ain't cheap so it cost me quit a bit to send it some. There are a lot of festivals so sending them to the ones that matter or fit your film is quit daunting. I send it to some and some select the film and some others don't.

I think it is quite OK to find out what works and what not but there are a lot of festivals contacting you and wanting you to submit for a discount. In the beginning you are like yesss, cool that you found my movie. But after a while you think mmmm, this could well be a trick to get some cash.

Most of those festivals are OK but just have that in mind. Festivals that give away a gazillion of "awards" are fishy just saying.

But nevertheless I send my film around to underground horror festivals and some bigger ones as well. And well you can't tell in advance the movie will get in so in the beginning I was eager to find out. It ended up in some selections and after a while some rejections came and that is OK, it stings a bit in the beginning but after a while you are like yeah Whaevs, move on. But they still cost money so my wallet says auch.

The bigger festivals are much harder to enter so I had no real luck with those. I got into a couple but that's how it is. Nevertheless it won some awards as well. I got a cash price at the new-york indie shorts awards. Won at a festival in Berlin, and some smaller festivals in England and America. And won some more cash in my home province so that is welcome and levels out the money I had to spend at the festivals.

If you have a short and you want to send it to festivals there is a site called filmfreeway. You enter all the data and upload your film and from there you can send it to the festivals you find interesting. Generally it can cost from 5 dollar to 80. It depends on what you aim for. Most smaller indie horror thingies cost under the 20 dollar. If you go all out big festival then it will set you at least 50 dollars back. So you can imagine that part of the filmmaking bizz is a bit cost intensive. 

But I had some nice comments, here is a link: reactions

I had a great time at some local festivals and for genre specifically at Imagine Fantastic Film Festival here in Amsterdam. And the cool news was that I was selected for some training for my next endeavor called LORNA. I wrote a first script and got some helpful feedback and hopefully made it better:p

Lorna is a new story. The initial idea came when I went to a friend in Ireland 3 to 4 years ago. After that the first ideas were written down in 2020. Recently I went over it again after wrapping up WKTB and spend the last months perfecting it. I created my main character called Ben and have the world and feel all in my head. I dread some things like animation and I am seriously considering a mocap suit. And besides that I see what unreal engine is capable off lately and I am working out a workflow to get mocap into blender and into unreal and it works so perhaps that will be the flow.

But it is going to be a lot of work and the film will be around 20 minutes. So you can imagine I am really dreading to begin and spend all that time on it behind the computer. It will be fun eventually but this time I know what it will cost me in advance. 

When I have something presentable I will send it around to some studio's and perhaps there is some nice feedback that I can use.

But before making this I really want to make a violent thriller movie. This is something I have on my bucket list for quit some time and I was kind-off restless after finishing WKTB. So when developing Lorna I was quit content but since last week I had this restless feeling that made me a bit down so after soul searching I remembered that a full length filmed movie was next. That was always the plan after WKTB. It sounds crazy to even begin and expect this to happen but I am convinced that I can pull it off. No to a little budget and with the help of some friends this could work.

I want it dirty, raw, unfiltered and violent as F. The look and feel is in my head for years already but the story is in its first stages so I will take my time to get this right. It is super ambitious but I have to make this. 

If there are any updates on both projects I will share them fcuz.

My time was almost done:D audio and stuff

Hey you,

I freelanced my but off last year and this year was busy as well.

Recently I started to work at Mitsi studio by the way. Redrum was good to me in the beginning but the recent few years were kinda shit with lots of people leaving so I took the leap as well and not regretting it so that is good news.

WKTB

When dedicating so much time to a project one cant wait for it to be finished completely.

Well it took a bit longer than I would anticipate and that has some logical reasons. Music, ambience and sound effects.

When no money is involved and there is none Marvey Izijk aka mr Audio has graced me with his free time. And just like it was for me he also sees this as a great project with lots of things to learn.

So he took his time to collect all the good tools for the job and build up the knowledge that led us to the almost final result.

Yes almost. This week he gave me the first complete version with everything in it and it fits perfectly.

We sat many times behind the screen and talked about what to do and what not to. I am quit nitpicky since I have a music background and want everything to tingle my gut. If it does it is ok, if it does not...

When you depend on one person for such a big project they often wander off the path and procrastination occurs. I often found myself frustrated by this fact that my life's work dragged out too long and that sucked big time. Many times I asked Marvey to go on and set deadlines/goals to accomplish. Most of the time those were never met so it frustrated me more and more.

I got the fact that it was a learning process for the both of us but when you are done with a film it takes the joy out of it to wait for such a long time.

So staying nice was often a concern and I did not want to be that guy so that was not ok to be in that position. 

It also is a lot of work so I understood that it would take time but it took about 3 years for the audio to be at this point and most of those 3 years were squandered in my opinion.

Nevertheless I took some extra months after I was "finished" to tweak some shots and make a few extra where I found something lacking. So it made the film in that regard better. And when you have the time to distance yourself from the film it delivers a neutral look when you go back into it so I edited some more and altered the pacing and trimmed the fat so to speak. 

Would I change more if I had the chance, yes but I am content with the way the movie is. I would do some things differently but heck, this is the best I could do at that time in my life. And I am happy with it. It is dark as fuck and a scary short if I can say so myself. Most animations are not scary. The last few years "love death and robots" delivered some adult animations that I fancied a lot.

And recently Arcane, I am not by definition a animation/game lover but this stood its ground and was the best series I saw last year. I had doubts going in but they disappeared as quickly as they came. Best animation I ever saw. Great story, unbelievable visuals, animation style Gddamn. What not to like.

Back to WKTB

So now the first version is done Marvey thinks he will deliver the final version next month.

For now I put this version onto filmfreeway to submit it to festivals. It unfortunately costs a lot of hard earned money but I saved a certain amount to get it out there. By the time it will get into festivals the final version is ready to go.

All the artwork is done for the posters so those will be printed in the near future.

I made a trailer for the film as well including some nice audio from Marv.

Trailer WKTB

You can see more on my instagram.com/darkworx_art 

Now is the time to enjoy the ride I guess.

Framed an animation festival in Groningen invited me to speak about the process so that is gonna be scary so check that out if you will. 26,27 and 28th of may 2022.

Framed animation festival

I have lots of ideas in my head but limited time so it is quit the endeavor to go to new places in my head.

See you there.

My job here is done

 So here it is. The long road to finalization has ended and I am done with my part of the film. I have inserted some last scenes and polished some shots and I am happy with it how it is.

The atmosphere is there and I have captured my vision as a filmmaker in this passion project. I think I have succeeded in making a dark short horror story all started off by a dream/inspirational nightmare I had.

So as strange as it seems it is hard to say goodbye to it. One of the reasons is that this is an atmosphere short with a storyline that has an ending which could be much more that it now is but I have peace with it. This was my goal and I've made it. Would there be things I would do differently...yes!

I always said I wanted to make a horror short and not a Pixar short. I am not an animator by any stretch of the imagination. My animation is ok for the purpose I had in mind as you will see in the future.

So what's next...well Marvey is fixing the audio design and music so that will take up some more time but things look promising. I always intended the movie to be done in 2020 and for me that is true. I did not expected audio to take as long. But hey it is all freebee work so it is what it is.

Next up I will start to make some making off kinda vids for insta, little break downs that will be teased around. I have made the posters already and made a first edit for the trailer. So things are in the works.

I also made an ident for the movie and since I am already thinking off a million things to make when this is completely done I decided to make an identity for my films. So the title of my film ventures will be Darkworx. Since all things I come up with are dark in whatever shape or form. 

Here are some stills and thats all for now.

Closer

2 months since my last post. A lot has been done to the project since then.
When you work so long on the same passion project I find it quite hard to let go of shots until they are livable with. Everything in this project I do from the gut and don't stop until my inner demon is pleased.
This project is no means the ideal project or how it should be done in a professional way. That was clear very early. And I would do so many things differently now but yeah people learn.

What a thing is that pops sometimes in my mind is that people often say, you don't have to invent the wheel twice. And I am all for it but I think in many things it is necessary to find your own way in the struggle. I could learn about animation and about camera work but I wanted to do what feels good, what makes sense to me instead of walking in the same steps as others. As tempting and probably wisely would be the better thing to do. But I think that struggle makes your own style pop up.
And I am grateful that I made it this far. I never thought that something that started so small would occupy my thoughts and time for so many thousands of hours.
I love every minute of staying in that fantasy where Timmy resides and think about what would be possible if this could turn into a full length movie etc. Who knows but I love the atmosphere and the darkness it comes with. It always has appealed to me and to make something like this is a great experience and I am proud in what it has become.
It will never be Pixar but it will be mine. No meddling from others and no clients with a complete disregard for style/logic to tell me otherwise.
I found out that I want to make movies for the rest of my life and love the process of creating something out of nothing. I am gonna do that for sure and I have 4 ideas lying there to make but time is not my friend in that regard and so is reality. I have to work for a living and I love my work if the work is challenging and it often is. But man what I would give to do this for the rest of my life.

But yeah back to the status of the project. It is kinda done but I am making tweaks to shots I am not 100% happy with and that must rerender etc but I think I will be finished on those last tweaks within 2 months.
Marvey the sound-magician will be doing all the audio work and that is gonna be the next biiiig thing that takes up a vast amount of time. That sometimes bugs me. I am very grateful for him to help me but I can't wait and am to exited to see where it goes. So that eagerness is not a good quality right now.

When I look back at the beginnings of the project I think damn how could I ever find my first designs cool...they look like shit. It is so strange to me that I am learning so much about the shape and design of things. It is like I watched a film about dinosaurs when I was little. It was clunky stop motion and ugly as fuck but then it was so freaking good and real.

And I have made a cool poster design which I will post in the near future. It is already done and I am happy with it so good times!




Nick

1 year later

Its been a while. So what is up...
Last december 2018 I made a first complete version of the short and well lets say it was good to see but a lot was lacking, foremost in the animation departement. So last year I fixed all the animation till a certain extend and now 1 year later I am happy with the outcome.
Again, animation is not my thing and is not something I intend to pursue but since this is a 1 mans quest to a 3d horror short it had to be done. So after a lot of tweaking and some last final adjustments I am almost done with all the animation.

Since that is almost out of the way I still have some other things that bothered me, some environments where not up to par and the little things so to speak are now popping up and need to be flattened out. Also I struggled a lot with the hair module in cinema, mostly the dynamic part, some hairs penetrated the face so I had to sculpt the hair different or adjust the dynamic settings a bit with a lot of trial and error to get it to work.

So what is the status. I am rendering scenes which had those little things out and then it is time to comp some more and put some effort in snow prints and little cold breath/smoke thingies to make it a bit more realistic. I have vacation for 1 more week so that is what is up next and I hope to be done with the whole thing at the end of February. By the time I get there there will probably be some other things bothering me but for now that is the target.

Marvey, I colleague of mine is gonna make the audio and music work for this master piece:D
And the self appointed deadline is in december 2020. HOHOHO, lets go

I can't wait to show it to y'all!

late update

Well hello, I am back again.
It has been a busy time for me lately so lets start from the start why I haven't been updating this life size project.

-my other short film is finally done, it was a short sci-fi, drama, thriller esq type thing and the teaser is in the link below.
Ik geloof in monsters (I believe in monsters).
It has been quit the undertaking and since it was my idea I had to do a massive job to get it done.
But it is done and I am happy with it. It is in dutch so for those who don't know dutch, there will be an English version in the near future.
Now I will submit it to some festivals and we'll see what it does. But that wasn't the point.
It was my first finished movie and that was a great deal for me to finish something tangible.

It has opened my eyes to doing more of that in the future after this project so from now on I'll focus all my energy on this thing!

Also it was summer and I got married with my now wife Maureen and we had the best wedding evah, it was great, people where great, weather was great, food was great, just fckin great.
After that we went on honeymoon to Bali and that is a great place to spend some days I can tell you that. Beautiful!

Also when it is summer I don't vibe as hard on WKTB so I am glad the good weather is almost over and I can dwell some more in my dark wintry vibe the project reflects. Summer ain't no good then.
I did some tweaks on the lighting and that causes a lot of scenes to be rendered over so I have done that but then I was annoyed by the flat looking eyes so I did some work on those as well.
Which are making me render a whole lot all over again, also some other tweaks on the face and hair so all will be better eventually and as you can read through all of this blog...it is a learning process and that I can tell you this is a hard thing to take sometimes. You want to progress as fast as you can but then reality kicks you in the sack and it is back to the drawing board.

But I am happy now with the new light and textures so I have rendered some new scenes out which some frames are here to see below.
Around x-mass I will have a lot of time to make a big leap into this project so until then minor steps but they are steps...

Also I will be doing some vfx work on a short of a friend of mine so work work work.

Till we meet again!

more images

From now on I'll try to fix 2 shots a week and also render them with some minor post on top.
Here are some images

second image

Well I am getting shit done!
I have textured all things in Timmy's room with some triplanar/cubic mapping, nothing to fancy.
Love octane dirt tho.

I ran into a problem with octane, it would render my scene in the preview window but not to the picture viewer, I had struggled several hours with that so I was desperate and contacted Aoktar but that didn't help much more so I had to figure it out. I found out eventually that since my scene was 1600frames long octane had to calculate all the frames before those which I wanted to render.
The render I was making was around frame 1500 so the trick was...put the time slider to the part you want to render and that's it...
Big whoop.
The render below is almost the final render, I previewed the scene in 1024 and have some things to correct before doing that HD thing.

Check it out!

first image

So after a week of tinkering around with stuff and getting back into octane I got this for you.

Octane has some issues now and then so I am still trying to figure out how and what to do with it to get this show going. Nevertheless what freedom to work with this renderer, it is fast as hell and with my 2 cards it chews fluidly through the data.
I have to texture the rest of the room, 70 percent is done so I will do that in about 2 weeks I try to finish the room.
One problem I encountered was that octane did not render with hair on so I have to dive into that to make it work.
But whatever, this is looking good with a little after effects touch!

Onto the next one!

next up

Sooo,

It is the time of the year that I have roughly 8 days to spend on Timmy. The past months I was super busy with some freelance work and another short movie. This short movie is a real filmed thingy and the edit is finished now. I still have to write some voice-overs for it and some additional shooting will take place in January. That will go smoothly I guess, also I have to finish some visual effects shots for it. I thought when we decided to do the short movie that it would not take so long as it did now.
But hey, that's how we learn. But the good thing is that I did something I never really had the courage to do someday. I always wanted to do shorts in my heart but after doing it it has given me so much knowledge and drive to do lots more.
Buuuut I have to get with the program and decided that I would do another one after WKTB is finished. Sooo I have do go deep and finish this thing. I have another week to work on it since it is vacation time and that is my favorite time of the year:D I wanted to do some more animation these last days but I am kinda happy with how the animation looks right now. I think I just have to go and make all the shots nice with more detail and textures etc and start rendering the damn thing.
My animation skills are not the best but I have done my best to get it as far as I could on pure feeling. I have the animation bible but I don't want to read it and follow everything in there. It is not advisable but hey I am a stubborn man and I have to invent the wheel my own way. It is not the way to go but I wanted it to be my thing on my terms. So the end result will not be pixar quality but a quality I will be happy with.

So from now on the fun begins and it is all about look and feel:D

I will dump some screenshots here when I have some.
Oh yeah some render news, at work we are trying cycles, I really like that in combo with x-particles and the settings are kinda sweet. Nevertheless I will render my short with octane still, I am curious how redshift will do the job so perhaps I will do a shootout between the 2, everything that works faster is better I guess since I have about 11 minutes of animation to render.
Oh yeah, love the x-particles update, those guys know what we love and I am glad they came up with cycles and made that available for us c4d users and get some nice results out of that.

Thats it, lets get to work.

Nick

wait for it

Hey there, again it has been a while since I posted anything on here. Well I haven't been sleeping for sure so what happened in the meantime..
I am working through the shots that need more love animation wise so that will take like another year I guess... but I am working on it.
But another thing I also have been working on besides freelancing like a mtfrfckr last 3 months is another short.
This short movie is a traditional short so are about to start filming it next week. It will encompass 3 days of shooting and the story is about the relationship of a boy and an older man in the not so far future. The world has changed but they did not and are in constant danger of being found.
I will post some more about that when I am finishing the film.

But now I have vacation and I will spend a lot of time on the short, I will try to squeeze in some wktb time cuz I want to finish this fucker asap. But that aint gonna happen so be patient with me.
What I fount out about myself last year is that I really really like telling stories and that this is something I like to pursue in the future. So I want to get this wktb short out of the way cuz I have some great ideas that can't be done now.

Strugglin aaah, but its a good struggle!

I'll keep y'all posted.

fly

Hey there,

I thought lets put an update on here, it has been a while fcuz.
So good newsss by the way, I got engaged last week..we where in Italy for a short vacation and I phaaped the question! After almost 14 years it is about time to seal the deal so to speak.

But that aside I am working hard on my short fcuz and I am taking care of the flythrough.
It is a 2.0 version, I rendered it with octane on direct lighting settings.
The pathtracing option was to noisy for me and for a quick satisfying fix I was content with the first option. In post this fast moving camera shot can be tweaked to my hearts content.
And with that a screenshot is added fcuz.

So as many people hear and read and try to figure out what renderer to use I am also constantly struggling with that question. As you can read in the beginning of this blog I bought vray with the promise of having an ipr.. that came after 4 years or so and I was frustrated by the amount of issues I got myself into. So I completely abandoned vray, worst 700 euro's ever spend. And now recently all these renders came out and I am so interested but also in a big project like I am working on I can spend my time better that to do so.
What I decided was that a mega high end realistic look was not necessary and that my main thing was having access to a GI renderer without flickering in animation without hassle. Octane got my attention and also Arnold. I really like the super tight integration of Arnold and C4D but I have to be realistic that I can't afford to have this complete short rendered on a renderfarm..that is gonna cost a lot.

So Since Octane is really fast but has fcuz the issue that if the gpu is full like I have now, I have a 780ti with 3GB and that is a nice card but 3 gigs is not ok so I ordered a titan with 11 gigs and I hope I can insert that beast in my machine. And if needed I will buy a second computer with 2 more cards and that must be sufficient and that is more than I can afford with a wedding coming up:D

So like that greyscalegorilla dude says Arnold is da shit it is true but I cant afford to render everything on there so Octane even with its limitations is logically the only choice I have so far and perhaps redshift will be great who knows but shots are looking nice and feedback is ok so I am happy with this option for now.

Also I am doing some cloudshot, I probably try to do that with arnold but we will see. I checked a tutorial on Entagma, it has lots of Houdini tutorials and I think my brain can't handle Houdini I followed along with them just to make a nice cloud..and that cloud I will scatter to my hearts content to create a nice cloudscape before the flight through continues with the stuff in the screenshot above.

Due to the limited space for now on my graphics card I had to break the flight through up in 4 pieces and that will work nicely..sooo back to it, next up is animation of Timmy entering the room to get the ball of doom:D

Cheerio

almost full

Last time I made a post I was halfway there and now I am almost done...
And so far I am content with the result. I've come to the conclusion that I am at 80 percent of the awesomeness of most of the shots, some are better than others fcuz.
Every iteration makes it better so I think that when I have concluded the first complete draft it is still some work in the animation dept left, but that is ok

So what else did I do, well I redesigned the cabin in the woods, it is a horror short so there has to be a cabin in the woods, I had an rough idea so I made it look nice and there is still some work left but it goes nice with what I wanted it to be.

Also a part of the movie is a frozen moment where story lines are explained. For one why a frozen moment, well if I think about past events they are always frozen, it is a still not a movie clip that why and it works great for explaining some things. I had this shot for over 3 years in my head figuring out how to do it but I went in and it came together nicely so I am really happy with that being resolved.

Another thing I figured out was how to get decent snow on my forester plugin trees by 3d quackers.
It has a build in snow generator but that just didn't cut it detail wise so I used the mesher of x-particles which will give more control over metaballs than the built in version. That worked out great and I am super happy with that cuz I saw a great pack of 3d stock trees with snow for 150 dollars but they are to heavy geometry wise so this will do great.

Another thing I am wondering about as it comes closer every week is what to do with the rendering..
I want to use octane but I think I have to invest some more in an extra rig or something, I think I wait first and see how long the eventual shots take on 1 or 2 cards in my main rig. And then I will decide..

I will need another 2 months to finish this first draft to my hearts content so here is a still of the frozen moment..spoilerrr

Half

Been real busy with the project lately, I have put some real hard work in it for the past weeks. Sooo I am happy to say that I am halfway animating the darn thing. Not all the animation is worth mentioning for now but it is 90 percent there and that is good enough for me for now.
I will keep on doing this amount of work for the upcoming months and hopefully I will have a first draft ready within a few months. After that I will have to make the new beginning and the middle part which is not so much an animation animation thingy but more of a camera challenge.
I am working with my new laptop(dell xps15) and am doing some research for the new beginning with the flyover. There will be a gazzilion trees in there so I am trying out octane and that works great. But it is still a long way to go like all work for this project.

But I am optimistic that it will be great!
It won't be a pixar animation but the was never my goal, it was to make my vibe come to life in an animation and that is what it will be!

getting shit done

So this time it went a bit faster then I anticipated. I finished the first run of most of the animations.
It is still gonna be a hell of a job to go over them once again and clean or polish them but it is good to be in this place.
Last weekend I finished the final scene and most of the time I look at the animatic I made to use as a guide but for this scene I made some other choices and I am very happy I did. The scene is a bit of a thriller and I imagine a nice audio atmosphere with the accompanied dread to fit the vibe.

So next week I'll start with replacing the head of the old rig with the new one and start from the beginning and work my way up from there. Also there are some things that need change for example the sled, I made a better one so it has also be replaced...darn!

Also I have neglected the beginning and mid piece of the animation for now, that will shape along over time I guess. So still a lot to do but every step is one more, just one thousand more...

update

Soooo it has been a while but I that doesn't mean I haven't been busy.
Recently I had some freelance jobs I had to take care of and that is almost done. One more videoclip coming up soon.
Also here is a link to a commercial I made for kidsweek.

But back to the project!!! I am still animating and that will take some more time, cuz it is a lot.
Also I am not an animator, I try to do what works and I find that the workload is a bit to big for me and to slow of a progress but I will keep on trucking. It is so friggin much. So I thing hypothetical that I will be busy for a half year to get the first run ready and than I probably have to clean everything up and that will also take enough time.. helllll

But I still believe in this thing, even so much that I wrote a bigger story than the one I am animating.
Also my idea is to make it a real thing, a movie of some sorts.
This sounds big and it is but this is what I wanted to do with it eventually so I wrote a complete story that is dark as hell and I have a friend who will help me setting this up.
It wont be easy but it will be cool to try!

Also some music is being made by Mr Marvey at work and me, just for fun, some dark tunes that will be good for the soul:D

SO busy as ever!

Cheers

Nick

walk

So I had a week off and went into my project and spend most of my time finetuning my main character.

Thing such as the hair, the collar and the jacket dynamics had to be fixed. Thing I dislike is that the jacket sometimes gets to far away from the pants..so I guess I have to live with that, otherwise I am happy with the result.walkcycle Timmy Benson
Also I did about 2 scenes so not a lot but I try to be more methodical witch animation. I am no animator so I have to try things out, it is one big trial and error.

Timmy_v1000101010

Update on the hair, a bit more clump and some more hair, also redid the eyebrows, a bit more detail in that piece.

I made the hair a bit longer to get his age down a bit, in the render below I found him a bit to old looking.

Well, I guess you all understand that I am verry picky about my main character, it is still not 100 precent but today I redid the hair in another way, much faster and much more controlable.
So here is version 1794y29838aaaaaah

kathy_v3.0

So I was finishing the rig and look of Kathy cuz in about 3 weeks I have a week off and will focus on animating the new characters.

So I wanted to get my characters ready before that time.
No talk but an image of Kathy and that is all for now.

my dark creature

For the last 2 weeks I have been busy with my dark creature.
This creature will haunt Timmy in the short movie and I had a good idea of what it would look but never sat down and actually make it. So eventually I did and it worked out great for once, the inspiration I had was from an old magic the gathering card, it is called diabolic vision.

I bought the cards when I was 17 so 20 years ago just for the artwork and I am glad I did.
My drawings where ..ok but it really got me working in a way I like best and that is with atmosphere.
I love to work from my gut so to speak, things have to feel good. Also I love some inspiring music in the background to feed the mood.

Back to my "villain", it comes in 2 forms, one ordinary human character and a monstrous version. I fairly quickly modeled a head that matched my feel of the character and after that I had to make the monster version as wel. I have a hint that makes the connection between the 2 apparent.
I want to show the creature but that will majorly spoil some things and I don't know if I want to do that...

Also it took me quit some work to get the creature the way I wanted to. Since I had a base mesh I wanted to sculpt the detail into it in c4d, but how wrong I was, the baking in c4d sucks big time so I tried 3d coat. Since I had no experience with the software I decided to give it a go and I really liked it until the moment I had to bake the map out...it took me 3 days and no result without artifacts so that sucked big time.
People where very nice on the forum and it is probably my inexperience with the software.
So I tried it in zbrush and after some tweaking in the settings it gave me the desired result.

Creating the rig was no problem with the c4d's character rig but I had some issues with the weighting and that is just my inexperience as well I guess.
After some trial and error hours I got it where I needed it to be.
Also I bought Valkaari's delta mush, check it out here!
http://www.valkaari.com/?product=delta-mush
I can't wait to use it on my next character, this can be a huge timesaver.

So thats that for now.

Next up is the villain in it's human form.