TheOtherLab - Leica (Creatures)

One of the major project in TOL that I was heavily involved in from the start was the Creatures NFT collection, it started off as a more simpler project that slowly expanded and ballooned into a whole new NFT collection. The creatures project were a learning phase for me and my fellow artist colleagues as it was the first time we were learning and familiarizing ourselves with Cinema 4D and Octane Render pipeline. The first creatures that we started off is Gloop which is more vanilla looking but with every new Creatures, we were constantly pushing ourselves and the 3D tech and so there were some differences in the design and tech across the Creatures as we get more and more familiar with the workflow and tech. As the whole creatures collection were a combined effort, how we divide up the workload is that me and my colleagues will all choose some of the traits to do, while usually I'm the one that set up the masterscene in Cinema 4D with the help of my art lead and designing plus texturing the Creatures and the various colors schemes alongside the various expressions of the Creatures. Throughout the creation process, we will compile and update the masterscene and once everything is finished for that Creature, we will use a script to generate the various designs pulled from the list of traits and render them out over time.

Leica is the forth Creature that we worked on and the name was inspired by the soviet space dog Laika which was the first living creature sent to space and orbit around earth on the Sputnik 2. The first iteration we did for Leica was standing up but we eventually tweaked the model to sitting down so as to have some variations poses for the various different Creatures and also to add in details like the dog paw. Leica also have substantial amount of fur in the body compared to the previous Creatures which we had to comb and adjust in Cinema 4D accordingly to the collar.