Chest Mimic #1 Poly Mesh

I've started on the chest mimic today. I started by building some low poly legs. All the detail with this creature is going to go into the legs and the teeth. I'm planning on a long tongue also, that will be rigged up to animate. If you have read Terry Pratchett's  The Colour of Magic your probably familiar with the idea of chests sprouting legs and trying to bite you. The Mimic is a classic Dungeons and Dragons creature. Often disguised as a treasure chest to catch out the unwary.

The legs are quite short and should give the chest a nice broad waddle like a drunken angry duck, at least that's the picture I've got in mind at present.
I actually bothered with toe nails on this model as there is a lot less detail to worry about on this character compared to a normal character. Heads and hands usually eat up your poly budget with a more standard games character.

 Here is an early shot of what I've got going with the teeth. Pretty basic at the moment, the upper set fit with the lower set to a reasonable standard at the moment. I may want to put some more polygons into the teeth to stop them looking so angular, or I may leave them not sure yet.

 I also did a test animation for fun. Just to see how the teeth are fitting and if it will look right when I'm finished. Looks like this toothy critter is going to be fun to work with.

Treasure Chest Low Poly Model

Just made a new low poly model. It's intended as a game asset and it's up for sale on Turbosquid like my last model. I decided to make a treasure chest as it's a common model to find in rpg's and mmorpg's like WOW and Runescape.

I started out with a sketch to get in the mood, and ended up with this.

I put a lot of work into the bump map which was fun. A bump map gives the impression of surface detail by using a greyscale texture map (an image file like a jpg or targa). The white of each pixel represents how much it sticks out from the surface and vice versa.

You can see the wire frame in that image too which I rendered into the colour channel. I've always wanted to work on an rpg but so far no luck :(
I'm planning on developing this into a Mimic which is a D&D monster, I will post up my progress here.