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Creature from the Black Lagoon reloaded

ZBrush Artworks
#9

Love the idea, and he’s coming along nicely. But there are a few tricky areas…

I think the curved folds above his eyes are bothering me. They feel out of focus, if that makes any sense. It’s not clear whether those are rigid or fleshy?

The overlapping wrinkles and ridges under his eyes threw me off in the earlier draft, but are less evident now. Like, I think you’ve got folds of loose flesh pulled taut over cartilidge; mixed signals of stress and release. Maybe the overall form of his eyelid should be broken up between ridges, like the material of an umbrella or a bat’s wings? Not sure.

And finally, I think less symmetry will improve realism tremendously. A few miscolored splotches here and there should go a long way…

#10

Fantastic creature

#11

That is a cool design!

I just watched ALTERED http://www.alteredmovie.com/
It kinda reminds me of that, woulda been a better movie if they incorporated your design.:wink:

#12

I’ll be adding some asym to him soon as I usually leave that stuff to near the end as it allows me to texture and sculpt in a mirror image and THEN change than to sculpt with ASYM from the start.

Your right about the area above the eyes etc…it’s lost a lot of its sharpness since texturing so I’ll have to go back in to that area again I feel and sharpen it up. Chances are when blurring a part of the texture out I’ve had ZAdd on as well and it’s blurred the geo as well. :slight_smile:

Ideally I’d like to keep this a Zb render if I can, although we’'ll have to see how far I can take it.

Wayne…

#13

[~blacklag2-sm.jpg](javascript:zb_insimg(‘73734’,’~blacklag2-sm.jpg’,1,0))

Nothing major this time, few minor tweaks. mostly more experiemnts for final shader lighting and composite.

Wayne…

#14

BlackLagSSS-sm.jpg](http://javascript%3cb%3e%3c/b%3E:zb_insimg%28%2775102%27,%27BlackLagSSS-thumb.jpg%27,1,0%29)](http://javascript%3cb%3e%3c/b%3E:zb_insimg(‘75138’,‘BlackLagSSS-thumb.jpg’,1,0))

Attachments

BlackLagSSS-thumb.jpg

#15

What a great idea, Darth. Sort of takes away the “guy in a rubber suit” look. I especially like the eyes in the 2nd-to-last render.

#16

looking good wayne keep up the great work looking good i would kind of like to know how you did the hard surface modeling on that armor?

#17

looking good… keep up the great work

#18

Very VERY nice! as usual your talent both inspires and amazes. Well done Wayne!

#19

change the teeth, tongue and eyes material or spectacular ;] The lighting is perfect :+1:

#20

[attach=75180]wire.jpg[/attach]

Wire frame (retopped from sphere)

Thanks guys I’m glad it went down well. The lighting is justa MR Sun / SKy final gather set up in max (although it did takea while to get the look I wanted.)

As you can see from the wire, the mesh apart from the teeth is all one part, so I’m very walled in how much I can actualy do with my specular maps. But to be honest I never thought I’d be taking this to a final render so thats a fault in my planning really. Its a shame as I nice set of eyes and some variation on the tounge would have helped a lot I feel. But as it was only a ‘spherehead’ thats retopped it was always going to have some limitatoins at render time really. (Its a shame really :frowning: )

Wayne…

Attachments

wire.jpg

#21

you can try uploading a little bigger sub level and apply a difrent material to certain polygons responsible for the tongue, the sewing schouldnt be visible on that lighting ;] That way you wont have to use spectacular maps ;d Also you can hide the old eyes with a new set putted on them ;]

#22

Probably the simplest way would be to simply split the mesh into parts such as the tounge eyes and head using masks (also a very good way to get higher polycounts if your system is maxing out BTW :wink: ). The only trouble is that its got to be precise for areas like the eyes and could get realy fiddly really fast.

I prefer using spec maps as a rule as for ‘serious’ sculpts, it gives more control when it comes to rendering in external applications. If I have time I’ll give it some thought and see if I can correct the eyes etc…

Wayne…

#23

Awesome :eek: :eek:

#24

This creature is looking very cool. Looking forward to the completed mesh.

Justin

#25

Hmm.
This Z2 tutorial from Antropus offers some ideas to control specularity inside of ZBrush (to great effect).

Of course, He’s using more complex materials than the simplified Z3 Matcaps we all love. This video tutorial from EZ shows how to convert matcaps and open up those parameters for extra control.

So, now you have a great render in ZBrush. How do you leverage this work in outside applications?

Exporting your specularity map is tricky, but can be done. This Z1.55 tutorial from Aurick delivers a map of which material is applied to which pixels in your texture. You can use that in Photoshop to isolate each material on its own layer, and adjust their levels to produce an appropriate specularity map.

(Granted, a normal person would just paint a greyscale texture over the model to accomplish the same thing, but these steps take out the guesswork and give you a lot more visual feedback along the way.)

Gosh, if only someone could whittle this info down to one unified workflow, bring everything up to date with the latest interface, and sell me a project-based tutorial DVD, that’d sure be swell! :smiley:

#26

Gosh, if only someone could whittle this info down to one unified workflow, bring everything up to date with the latest interface, and sell me a project-based tutorial DVD, that’d sure be swell! :smiley:
That’d be really cool! I wonder who’s good to do that? Hmmmmmm
<dusty looks around with finger on lip>;)

#27

Thanks for those links…its been years since I last looked at Antopus’s tutorial and had completely forgotten about it. :slight_smile: I’ve been using variations on the other methods for a while now for certain projects. I am working on a specular map workflow right now that hopefully would be pipeline friendly enough to stick on one of the DVD’s. Although I stress to say its in early stages of theory right now, so may be the volume after the next batch.

The trick is making a workflow that not only is robust enough, but not overly complex to do. (Although some ‘app jumping’ is inevitable I think.) Plus its got to give just as good a result as standard methods otherwise its a pointless excersise.

Wayne…

#28

trying to get a hold of you, please email. want to talk about using your design.thanks.