It has for sure been a few months since I have had a chance to organize a project to post, but here I’ll try.
For about 2 months or so now, a friend of mine who works for a visual effects company asked me to join him, as creature concept artist, for a short film that will later be put out by his workplace and kickstarter.com. As I have only been using ZBrush for a little over a year, this represented a great opportunity to use ZBrush for initial concepts, and flushing out models for this task. I would love to mention more on the project, and it’s story, but I will have to be a bit tight lipped for now.
Our first concept was something of a creature that would float along with tentacle like arms. So I made thumbs in PS, and started in on a body type.
After choosing a direction for the body style from thumbnail sketches, My friend (Art Dir.) and I chose to go along with the indicated ‘D’ pattern.
Since this creature character will more or less float in a plume of smoke, I imagined some tentacles and more or less a set of vestigial legs and arms. Still early at this point, and lots of room for play.
As I have come to learn over time and practice (a few user group meetings and tutorials I will thank later), I start exploring our head shape and thinking of the devices that will give the form a character.
More exploration, and lots of iterations come and go. We still had a lot of room to work on this concept as I push further.
After a few versions and turns, I do some checks and decide to play with a few materials and BPR render settings in prep for learning how to more proficiently use some of the Render, Material, and MatCap settings.
About this point, I have had a few different progressions going, but My AD and I really started to think that we were getting holed into a direction that was a bit too anthropomorphic, and so I then decided to gather an image board for ref rethink some of the elements one would find in Sea or insect shapes and textures…
The next three images (below) for example became an idea for the head to draw in more Insect/Crustacean like design.
At this point, starting to get comfortable with classic brushes like the Dam_Standard, Standard, Pinch, Inflat, Clay tubes and Buildup brushes. Using them to more or less speed sculpt Maquette designs in frequency…
Note—> I would love to continue sharing the other WIPs in this progression, but I have to stop and continue on a second post. Rather sorry for the long wording and large images in advance.
In the meantime, please feel free to comment as always and crits are welcome!
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