Alien Animation Project Remake

I promise not EVERYTHING I post here is going to be remakes and revisits of older projects, but there is going to be a lot of that. In the second semester of that 2010 animation class, we learned more complex character modeling techniques, rigging, and animation. The culmination of that semester's work was a ~90 second animation of a couple of generic gray aliens investigating a strange artifact. Hilarity ensues. Not really, though.

I thought it'd be a fun project to revisit and apply all the things I've learned about Blender, so I set about working on that. Started with the character model, since I've learned a good deal about Blender's sculpting tools and how to use "meta balls" to make limbs more effectively.

And I had just recently figured out how to make the Cycles engine cooperate with my PC and its fairly powerful GPU. I initially had trouble getting it to work because it turned out my drivers were outdated, so everything I tried to do in Cycles ran so slowly as to be unusable. But now I can do procedural displacement mapping that only takes a few seconds to update the live preview instead of upwards of a minute each time I change something. So basically, making good looking terrain is much easier to do now.

These shots most likely won't actually appear in the final animation. I just made the renders to see how everything looked.