I’ve been working on a series of educational content in collaboration with Beyond Extent, focusing on tiling textures and creating materials in Substance Designer.

You can find out more about the courses and explore the content here:
https://lnkd.in/eRQ4Kv7e

Thanks,
Ben

Hi Everyone, 

Since the last update, I have been working on fleshing out the final model for the Dinobot. The last time I wrote a blog, I did a second-pass blockout for the model itself. 

This is where we left off last time, with a final blockout for the raptor mech. Looking back at this now is a nice reminder of how far it's come. 

In the last blog, I wrote a breakdown for the design of each element - leg, arms, tail, body, neck and head. I was focused on:

• How does each of the individual elements move 
• Blender file setup 
• Break the model into rough materials, panels, and a rough design idea. 

Since then, it's been a decent journey and a lot of hours of modelling to get the raptor modelling finished. In that time, I also had educational content to work on, a house move, new business ventures and a new job role. So I have been fitting that in around all these other commitments. 

Here is the latest model and the progress shots as I worked on it. 

Here are closer-up shots of the different sections and a breakdown of my thoughts when making each section 

For the leg, I really wanted to play up the giant claws and exaggerate that feeling a bit. I put greater detail into the joints and areas around the panels but used the panels to create areas of rest. I also introduced pistons and framework that is hidden under the surface.  Across the design, I also unified the colours and emissive values. 

As raptors stand on two legs, I wanted the legs to feel powerful and stable. I scaled the main joints up as big as I could get away with and tried to follow the anatomy of a real raptor to make everything feel stable. 

For the arm, it was a similar story to the legs. I unified the materials and emissive values. The biggest design challenge here was hard-surface feathers and how they integrated into the arm. I wanted the hint back to the historically accurate raptors being smaller, bird-like creatures, and to find a way for feathers to make sense in the design. Again, around the hands and arms, I played with the shape language being a lot more organic and rounded, hard-surface design. 

For the body, this was mostly about establishing the connection with legs and arms, and how those sockets would work. The other thing I worked on a lot, which guided the rest of the design, is areas where you would see electronics and pipes. I used inspiration from the Horizon series to inform how that might look. 

As well as the body that connects all other areas to the parts of the design, I wanted to take inspiration from my Ecobot beetle and build an interesting environment within the robot again. I originally toyed with the idea of having water jets and tanks on the back, but since raptors are carnivores, it didn't make a whole lot of sense. I decided that carrying their eggs on the back of the mech made more sense. So I came up with a rotational nest that holds the eggs. This is all animated with the panels for the back to open up and reveal the eggs. 

For the tail, there are two main elements: the main repeating section and the end of the tail. For the model, I tried to work out the internal structure/frame and how that would feasibly function with the correct joints before layering panels on top. I also added fabric, which can hide some of the internals and is great for filling out the awkward gaps under and between the panels. Once I had one section of the tail, I then repeated that using array and deformed it along a spline, which allows me to position the tail in whatever position makes sense.

For the tail end, I wanted a slightly different feather design which really highlights that hard surface feather feel I mentioned earlier. These are made as one straight feather which is bent/deformed into shape and positioned manually to create the design at the end. 

For the neck, this was a lot of the same techniques I used for the tail, except I had a few more underneath splines/pipes and structure on the front of the neck. This is because when I looked at a lot of visuals of raptors, they have a lighter colour on the underside of their skin under their tail, stomach and neck, so I wanted to get that colour change across. I mostly kept the panels on the back of the neck. 

For the head, anatomically speaking is very close to a real raptor. I didn't want to change it too much cause I want it to read and be recognisable as a dinosaur. The big design choices here are rounding out the tops and sides of the face in the panel shape language. I played a lot with the big head piece, which is a big visual statement and makes the design feel different and unique.

I hope you appreciated seeing the update and the visuals, and the thought process for designing this model. 

Next up, I will be working on making a lower-res and UVd mesh. I am likely planning to use a bunch of UDIMs to texture the model before texturing and final presentation 

Thank you for reading 
Ben

Hi Everyone, 

I get a lot of requests for 1:1 mentorships, and until now, I haven't had a proper way to offer them. Until now! 

I decided to add mentorship options to my educational storefront, which I have been working on. You can find the option through Gumroad and Artstation. 

If you have any questions or are interested, feel free to reach out. I can help 

Gumroad 
Artstation

Looking forward to continuing to teach people! 

Thanks 
Ben 

Hi Everyone, 

I am doing an AMA with Sierra Division this week! Here is the post they made below. 

Ben Keeling is a Principal Environment Artist at Respawn with over 13 years in the games industry. He has helped shape worlds on major AAA titles across leading studios, including Need for Speed, Halo, Suicide Squad, Star Wars, VR projects, and Iron Man.

In this latest SDA Live event, Ben joins Jacob Norris and Greg Robb to discuss:
- His background and experience getting into AAA Games
- His Environment Art process 
- Share a sneak peek at his upcoming course at Sierra Division Academy

Join the event through the Sierra Division Discord to take part in the live Q&A 

Learn more about Ben: https://www.artstation.com/benkeeling

Details: 
Hosts: Jacob Norris and Gregory Robb 
When: Thursday, May 7 2026 
Time: 4PM UTC 
Where: Discord

See you there!

Eco-bot beetle by Ben Keeling

Hi Everyone, 

Since the last update, I have been working on fleshing out my design for the Dinobot. The last time I wrote a blog, I worked on blocking out the scene and the Robot itself. 

This is where we left off last time, with a rough blockout for the raptor mech 

Next, I worked on fleshing out the design to create what I call a 'high poly blockout,' where the majority of the design's forms and shapes are defined. It's not to say that panels and design can't change later, but it's a loose intention of how the design will look. I am mostly focusing on a few different things, which I will list here

• How does each of the individual elements move? What is the range of movement? What type of joint, etc. 
• Setting up the Blender file in a way that creates the least amount of work and allows me to iterate on the design easily - (Using collection instances) 
• Start breaking the model down into materials, panels, and a rough design idea. 

A lot of the thought process happens in my head, but to make this a bit easier to digest, I made these diagrams that detail how I approached each major section and how I thought it might work. I grabbed the illustrations of joints from this website here 

I am also using an anatomy model of a raptor as a base to design over, so I can get the anatomy and silhouette to read like the real dinosaur. For the leg, I want to display the obvious joints on the knee, show off that big claw on the foot, and get a rough idea of some panel lines. I will definitely revisit these later as I go through the design.

 

For the arm. It's a similar story: get the rough joints and movement solved. Again, starting to think about how the arm could be sliced up into multiple chunks. This helps me to think about opportunities for different material reads as well. A big thing I wanted to do with this design was add mechanical feathers, so I also worked on an arrangement that solved this. I thought it would be cool to have these as mostly visual, more like armour plating with feathers that actually function.  

When I work on robot creatures like this, I typically start with the legs and arms. I find that because they tend to be the least complex part of the design, it's easier to figure out the overall design language on something simple before approaching how joints and panels look across more complex parts like the body or head. 

For the body, I mostly needed some sockets for where the legs and arms would attach. I then used raptors as inspiration for a section of panels underneath the stomach, made from a single material and generally more interlocking and connected. For the back, I planned harder, sharper shape panels like an armour. I also wanted to experiment with either weaponry or some sort of water tanks that might go in the machine's back, so I figure I will need an attachment point on this area as well. 

For the head, I wanted to keep the Raptor's head mostly intact because I want the robot to be recognisable, which makes it very easy to identify. Again, I am thinking of a colour scheme with a different colour on the front of the neck from the back. Also, a big thing with this design was the feathers, as mentioned with the arm. On the head and around the neck, I wanted that cool silhouette read of the feathers. The neck is also a nice place for interlocking panels and cables, and for a housing that runs up the neck to show how the machine functions while also looking cool and creating depth. 

With the tail, it was a very similar story to the neck, lots of interlocking panels and a cool feathery tail at the end. Again, this is a good opportunity to introduce some depth with cables. I also wanted to test a joint that would work for the movement, not decided if I will actually include this joint or not within the tail, cause the panels may mostly cover it anyway, so I need to test a quick rig and see how it performs or whether I just allow that part to deform the panels a little. Just depends on how noticeable it is. 

That's it for the breakdown of the different parts. I hope this does a good job of explaining my thought process a bit and shows some of the progress in the high-poly blocking for the model. 

I also wanted to provide a render of what this looks like compared to last time, and a GIF of the WIP modelling. 

Finally, let's talk about the next steps for the project. My plan now is the following steps 

• Final high poly design for the leg, arm, body, neck, and head 
• Rig and animation testing 
• Pose and test in the environment
  
  

If you got this far, I appreciate your time and thank you for reading about my process. Let me know if there is something specific you would like to see next or if you have any feedback on the project so far. 

Thanks 
Ben 

Hey Everyone, 

I was really sad to hear about the Flipped Normals marketplace closing down last week. They had some really amazing content on their site, with lots of creators making great tutorials. 

They are running a closing-down sale right now, so feel free to check it out on my store page here: Ben's Store. 

Despite this sad news, before the closure, I was contacted by Flipped Normals to work on an exclusive tutorial. I pitched a project I am super excited to complete, so I wanted to kick things off by talking about it and showing some WIP. I wanted to share my ideas and plans for the project and use this as a way to gather other artists' ideas and feedback. The tutorial will all be real-time, and I am going to show the process of this project from start to finish, so I'm hoping it's going to be a lot of fun to create and provide great value to other artists. 

The project title is - Dinobot 
Brief - Create a robot mech inspired by dinosaurs 
Art bible - Art Bible Link 

The first stage in any project for me is planning & creating documentation, as well as gathering references and creating a blockout 

For the initial planning, I completed the following. 

- Created an art bible 
- Tested the shallow water plugin in Unreal 5 
- Experimented with Megaplants to see if they would be useful 
- Did some quick speedtree tests 
- Experimented with AGX vs Aces for Unreal 

Next up was reference gathering. I initially did a lot of reference work using Pinterest, then translated it into PureRef. The image below highlights a small selection of some of the references I gathered. I also bought an encyclopedia on Theropods and visited the Natural History Museum in London to take some photos. I decided quite early on that I wanted to create a Raptor, not a Velociraptor as you see in the Jurassic Park movies, but something more historically accurate, with feathers. 

For the blockout, I started both a blockout for the mech as well as for the scene. 

For the scene, I used Megascans and Megaplants to start with. I plan to hand-sculpt a small collection of plants later, but this gives me a way to find out which assets I need without committing to making anything. I can test how many species and what variety I need. I used Dash to place this scene, which took me about an hour. 

I used Sketchfab to rip a blockout raptor into Blender and exported it to the game, and set up a cine camera and some lighting using UDS. 

For the raptor mech, I started in Blender. Again, using Sketchfab, I found a really nice raptor reference model to guide me on the anatomy. When creating any mechanical or organic creature, I find it very helpful to start with a solid foundation. Once I get into the process of designing the mech, I can always change proportions and silhouette later. I used a very similar process when I made my Ecobot as well. 

My general workflow for this is a combination of box and strip/edge modelling for the foundation. For very organic shapes, I use Sub D to keep the density low and make them easy to manipulate. Booleans as well, on occasion, such as to cut out where joints would go. 

Also, as this is mechanical, there are often areas with a lot of repetition, such as the tail or feathers. Even repeating details like panels that follow the neck's shape. To save time, I am making a single piece using an array and deforming it along a curve. The new Array modifier in Blender is really nice, as it lets you scale, rotate and transform the array so it can taper, for example. I also use the curve points to adjust the scale along the curve.

This is the blockout so far for the Raptor Mech. There are a few bits I need to tidy up once I get into proper modelling, especially around the head, as even in blockout, this lacks a little detail. 

Thanks for reading and getting to the end of the post. 

If you have time and want to give any input on the project, or if you have feedback or ideas/suggestions for what you'd be interested in seeing in the tutorial, please let me know! 

Thanks 
Ben 

Hey all, 

I have uploaded all my products as a creator to Flipped Normals. I wanted to let people know as ArtStation runs sales at different times. 

They have a sale now! 

Flipped Normals Store 

Enjoy 
Ben 

Hey Everyone, 

A few months ago, I did a workshop for Beyond Extent on my hard-surface project, Eco-Bot Beetle. 

This workshop focuses on some of the pipelines and workflows I used when I built the organic hard-surface robot. I had a great time hosting the class and had some great questions during the session as well. 

Thanks to the Beyond Extent crew and everyone who supported the workshop, you can now watch it for free here, and I hope you find it to be educational. 

Regards 
Ben 

Hey Everyone, 

I just release part 3 of my tutorial series. Here

This one is all about trimsheets and decals, which was a pretty requested topic. 

Now I have completed the planning/blockout and the materials section, which included

Materials
Shaders
Trims 
Decals 

I can finish off my series with asset-based approaches, though it may take me a little time, as I have some other classes/personal art to get done next. 

In the meantime, I hope you find these useful and feel free to check out my Mini series on Blender and Zbrush materials too. 

Thanks 
Ben

Hey Everyone, 

I wanted to create a blog post to announce that I have just completed the second part of the tutorial series. This one is all about Materials/Shaders. 

https://www.artstation.com/a/47912715

This one was a lot of fun to create. I'm pretty proud of the overall breakdown of how to develop materials and the high-level structure of this particular tutorial. 

I managed to cram a bunch of stuff from Designer, ZBrush Atlas creation, and ZBrush tiling texture creation into the materials. For the Shaders, I covered a variety of the different types of Shaders I typically use in my professional and personal art projects. 

Planning on doing a mini series next, which is going to teach Blender. 

See you soon 
Ben