John Hammond's Cane (Jurassic Park)

 Going back to the idea of collectables, I wanted to try to model something after being away from Maya for a while. I chose to keep with the fossil theme and picked John Hammond's cane from Jurassic Park. The dinosaur blood extracted from the mosquito was the start of Jurassic Park, so I thought it would make an interesting collectable. The cane features a piece of rounded amber with a mosquito preserved within. Fossils like this aren't uncommon and are referred to as amber with inclusions.

Because I knew the cane would be too big for close up inspection, I chose to make the amber detachable leaving the cane in the case

The cane intself was very easy to model. I split a long cylinder into even parts using edge loops and further subdivided those to create the bowed effect in the middle of each section. Other details like the rubber ferrule on the bottom and the capping extrusion at the top were created by very simple extrusions. I also bevelled the joints of each section since they looked far to sharp for something like a walking stick.

I chose to add the little slot in the middle and a pairing extrusion on the amber because the amber would be inspectable. It would seem strange that the amber simply sits within the cane without anything holding it in place. Which gave me a small animation idea for UE4.

The amber was relatively easy to create with the scale tool and soft select. I was able to manipulate the amber in a uniform way without making it look pointy and oval shaped at the poles. Since the mosquito would be contained within I knew I could get away with quite simple topology. I used cylinders and spheres to create the body and legs but some parts required more detail.

The head looked very goofy with the proboscis coming out without a gradual change in the face shape to meet it and the rear part of the body was far too clean. After looking at pictures of mosquitos I noticed that this is the part that inflates as they intake blood and it has an overlapping structure so I was able to create this with basic extrusions.

I kept the model very simple, firstly because of it's size within the amber but also because of the distorted view the amber would give in UE4. The mosquito took little time to create but created the desired effect.

Creating the cane in substance painter was relatively easy. I used the bone smart material as my base and played with the roughness and colour until it had the right look. I manually enhanced the occlusion at the joints of it by using the same bone material with a darker colour and a black mask.

With the roughness turned down the surface of the bone seemed to be missing some detail so I added a wood material underneath the bone letting the normal come through and adding a slight grain to it. I also added a dirt generator to the main part of the cane to add some faint discolouration on the surface without making it look grimy.

When making the amber material I ran into many problems. Firstly the amber blocked out too much of the mosquito and looked very glass like. The main issue was making the material look like a solid object with something encased inside rather than the mosquito looking like it was suspended in a thin glass ball like a bauble. I will make a separate blog post about the creation of the amber material because it proved to be quite a feat.

Just for fun, when the amber detaches it does a small rotation animation as if the object was unscrewing from the cane. I really enjoyed creating this model, it gave me a change from photogrammetry and allowed me to create something from one of my favourite franchises.