Re-Ti

I designed this alien for the Helpful Bear creature contest, where it got an Honorable Mention.

"Really neat concept and wonderful anatomy - you've also been able to convey good depth and perspective. Spot-on professional orthographics and anatomy make this creature easy for a studio production team to build, rig, and animate for a feature, game, or film."

Terryl Whitlatch

I present my intelligent alien, Re-ti. It may seem recognizable, but if you look closer, few things are what they seem at the first sight. Its “head” is not the actual head, its “hooves/suckers” are neither hooves nor suckers, its muscles can lock up in contracted position which enables it to use hydraulics for “pushing muscles” along with the more conventional pulling muscles, it communicates in two-voice tonal song, its hands were originally copulatory organs, it is neither biped nor a quadruped, in fact it is not even a vertebrate. But it is still something we hominins could relate to, because I had decided to design something that would “read” to us human beings but be quite alien in its anatomy, apart from the obvious biomechanics.

High-resolution images can be found here.

This creature is built on specific design logic, a fantastic Bauplan, if you like. I could design more creatures of the same phylum now, using this logic, which would be as diverse as fish, tigers, crocodiles, and birds. I feel that this approach (thinking of evolution of anatomy) can offer more freedom for truly alien creatures than basing on existing animals or combining their pieces. Here are some samples of such other bionts in the same phylum as Re-ti, both distantly and closely related:

Development sketches

Early thumbnails for possible Re-ti silhouette.

The page on the left was actually the first sketch done for Re-ti. The one on the right was done in the middle of sketching - you can see a version of sensorium in the corner which is almost the same as the final one. At this stage the eye wipers were not part of the concept yet.

Sketches used to figure out Re-ti proportions and posing: how does it stand upright, how does it stand quadrupedally, how long its limbs are, whether its hind or fore quarters are higher when quadrupedal, and so on.

A couple of other sketches are the internal layout and a detail of its open maw.

[Posing brainstorm image to be added later]

A mosaic of several pages of sketches of Re-ti limbs, from the basic structure and muscle architecture to possible arrangement of limbs, details of the distal areas and bits of skeleton. Re-ti ended up with all “hind limbs”; unlike Earthly quadrupeds whose fore and back limbs are mirrored, it has eight limbs and all of them are the same structure. It also has elbow-like levers on all major joints, its “toe” bases originated as floating bones parallel to the “tarsus”, and it has a hydraulic limb skeleton in addition to the bony one. And its extensor and flexor muscles can be intermixed on the same side, unlike in vertebrates who have them on the opposite sides of the limb.

Figuring out the details of Re-ti limb muscles:

The cleanup drawing for the triple view of Re-ti model:

Re-ti demo pose rough and cleanup drawing:

Rough sketch and cleanup drawing for Re-ti sensorium. Details like eye wipers (adapted limbs) and gill-like structures in the olfactory grooves can be seen clearly.