Hello all!
I’ve finally decided to post a dragon named Zsar that I’ have been working on for a while.
This character is some work I’ve been doing with my friends over at AnimationRigs.com.
He ended up becoming part of the Anim-Mates character library (characters they have available for animation tests, demo reels etc as a service). It took me so long to put the post together that Zsar is already rigged and moving around in Maya!"
Creating Zsar has been a great learning process for me. To start things off, I was given fantastic concept art that ARigs commissioned and had created by Kerem Beyit!
I started by creating the base mesh in Silo, then I imported it into Zbrush as nine separate sub-objects.
I wasn’t comfortable with using alphas at the time, and I wanted a very organic feel to the whole dragon, so I decided to hand sculpt all of it. I used the claybuildup brush mostly, with a lot of the DamianStandard and MAHcut brushes to work the creases.
Next up was texturing. Just like sculpting, I chose to texture the entire thing by hand using polypaint. I love the ability to paint right on my model! I made the textures black and white (grey value scale) on purpose. I wanted to give the animators the ability to do color overlays to easily change his color, but retain the value.
For the display pose, I decided to rig him up inside Zbrush using Zspheres. I was skeptical about being able to pose him well at first, but it turned out way easier than I thought. Transpose Master is King! I especially like how Transpose Master retains the polygroups, UVs, and texture maps.
The next step was the map generation. I have to admit generating maps was a test in patience until I figured out a good solution. I ended up using Decimation Master to drop his polycount down to something Maya could handle a piece at a time. I then used Maya’s Transfer Maps to transfer the detail and diffuse onto the final animatable Maya model. I had to do it that way since my low-res mesh was not the low version of my high-res mesh.
Lastly I handed it off to the crew at AnimationRigs and they rigged him up. Here is a final shot in Maya with the diffuse, normal, and spec applied.
Here is a movie of a sample animation and shot breakdown done with Zsar.
Thanks for looking!
Cheers,
-ShaneO
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