The Yale: Creature Exercise

A creature design based on the Yale, done as a demonstration for a ZBrush Creature class held at the Workshop Academy. Students began with a study of the primary and secondary forms of an ungulate (this creature started out as a pronghorn) and then later had to transform it into a predatory fantasy/sci-fi creature of their own design. We eventually go through the entire form hierarchy process, talk about morphological differences between predator and prey species, moving on to cover polypaint/color design, posing and presentation.

First image is a Photoshop composite of ZBrush renders. Following images use a bake of the high subdivision onto the low subdivision, rendered in Marmoset.

Yale are little known creatures from European mythology and heraldry whose notable feature is the ability to move their horns independently and use them as lances. I attempted to make the idea somewhat plausible by incorporating them into the mobile structure of the ears.

The yale (or eale) was first written about by Pliny the Elder in Book VIII of his Natural History: he describes the eale as a creature found in Aethiopia "the size of a hippopotamus, with an elephant's tail, of a black or tawny colour, with the jaws of a boar and movable horns more than a cubit in length which in a fight are erected alternately, and presented to the attack or sloped backward in turn as policy directs."