I am a long time Zbrush Central lurker. Thought I would finally post something here. The sewer creature is an in house test I worked on at Satellite Studios. We were putting Zbrush and XSI (Softimage) through it’s paces in preparation for another project. I designed, textured, rigged and animated the Sewer Creature.
Trevor Harder did all the lighting, rendering and compositing.
Trevor Tang modeled, textured and rigged the rat.
– Shannon
Looks fantastic in the renders… nice work! 
yep very nice indeed.The textures look great…Hes got alot of emotion too him.
Thats pretty good. I like how he fins look.
Nice work! 
Looks great, interesting design and skin texture.
Whoa… awesome work!
Great work, I give you tons of respect for being a well rounded artist. Model, texture, rig, and animate… sounds like my job but much more exciting since your working on creatures vs medical instruments! :lol:
Was this rendered with mental ray or XSI’s native renderer?
Thanks Cogu, sadicus and roger!
Aberrant: Thank you so much. I like working in many areas. Keeps me from getting bored :). I think many Generalists are like that.
It was all rendered with Mental Ray.
Maybe I’ll post a video clip here soon.
I LOVE the texture on the creature!
Mind sharing some secret on how you made the textures? like the membrane look with the vein-ish undertone.
I have a question regarding mental ray.
So I have my 32 bit displacement maps, and 32 bit normals (I dont even use the normal maps)
(this is from memory so I might miss something or call it something else)
I know that at the bottom of your material you go to mental ray connection and under extended shaders you put your displacement map as a 3D displacement.
From there you must offset your rgb to -.5 in your output settings to compensate for zbrush’s negative displacement. Turn the blur down to .01
next you need to go to the render settings and make sure displacement is enabled under the shadows/displacement
Did you use 220 as your extrusion strength and max displacement? and 1 for your displacement length and edge length?
I keep getting horrible looking displacements from mental ray so I switched back to vray.
Very nice sculpt and render! Well done! Hopefully your lurking days are over and you’ll be posting stuff more from now on 
Thanks Captain Sensible (awesome user name lol) and Celes. I am hoping to have time to post more here from now on.
Celes and Aberrant - This project is not fresh in my head at the moment. When I have some time I will definitely give you more info on methods used. Off the top of my head I can tell you Aberrant that I used a somewhat non-conventional way of dealing with the displacements. I used a little plugin for Softimage called Binder instead of conventional displacement mapping in MR for a few different reasons. Some of it had to do with speed of rendering since I used alot of SSS on him with several layers of texture maps for the SSS. Some of it had to do with getting better detail.
Hopefully I can find some time soon to get into a little more detail.
Madam Yes, thanks for the response. I would love to know more about it when you get the time. It sounds like a great alternative solution, and it obviously gives great results (looking at your work).
I do not know Softimage XSI yet, but it is one of those apps that I would love to learn. I currently know LightWave, 3DS Max, and basics of Maya. From what I hear, XSI is a great well rounded app and the modeling tools look wonderful.
Ahh, layers of SSS. I see. that’s something I heard of but don’t know much about cause I do in-game stuff. aight thanks.
A closeup of the Sewer Creature’s hand from the Zbrush model.
fantastic work and nice render
I love those renders. really cool creature!
I have seen your work before and really liked this sewer creature. Excellent Work!