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Character<br />
Refining the detail<br />
Making the monster come alive<br />
Once the<br />
09 creature was<br />
painted to a certain level<br />
of detail, I st<strong>art</strong>ed using<br />
ZAppLink to export<br />
screenshots into Photoshop.<br />
Using photos and different<br />
brushes, I refined the surface,<br />
giving it a higher res of detail<br />
using the Polypaint work as a<br />
guide. ZAppLink exported the<br />
changes back to ZBrush.<br />
After the creature<br />
10 was complete, I began<br />
texturing the eyes using the<br />
same technique as before. The<br />
fingers, toenails and rocks were<br />
mostly painted with Polypaint<br />
and ZAppLink, and the texture<br />
maps were refined further in<br />
Photoshop with numerous rock<br />
and stone overlays.<br />
2 hours<br />
render time<br />
Resolution:<br />
2,000 x 2,554<br />
Now that the creature<br />
11 was modelled and<br />
textured, it was time to set up<br />
a render in Maya. I exported<br />
out the posed model, base and<br />
anything else at a high<br />
resolution using ZBrush’s plugin,<br />
Decimation Master. This<br />
condenses the creature mesh<br />
from 17 million polygons to<br />
500k for export.<br />
In Maya I set up the scene, imported the decimated<br />
12 meshes and creating shaders for all the geo. I used a simple<br />
rig of about three area lights and one spotlight, an IBL node with an<br />
HDRI mapped to it, and three colour cards for reflections.<br />
UV map<br />
details<br />
Cthulhu UVs were all in<br />
one map for this project<br />
as I wanted to do 80 per<br />
cent of the painting<br />
inside ZBrush. To get<br />
crisp enough details I<br />
recommend blocking out<br />
the main colours with<br />
Polypaint, but this leaves<br />
you with a fairly low-res<br />
texture. I set my<br />
document size to<br />
4,480x3,360 and<br />
zoomed right into the<br />
area I wanted to refine.<br />
Clicking ZAppLink will<br />
export the screenshot to<br />
Photoshop where it can<br />
be edited at high res and,<br />
once saved, project<br />
those details onto the<br />
mesh. This way you’re<br />
only limited in detail to<br />
whatever your UV map<br />
is set up as.<br />
The skin<br />
13 material<br />
was set up using<br />
mental ray’s SSS<br />
shader and the colour<br />
map was converted<br />
into multiple skin layers<br />
such as epidermal,<br />
subdermal and overall,<br />
which were used to<br />
create a translucent<br />
slimy skin. I then<br />
rendered out six<br />
passes, diffuse,<br />
reflection and multiple<br />
speculars and then<br />
comped them all<br />
together using<br />
Photoshop.<br />
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