thanks for that. I’ll get it as soon as the next check is in.
Very cool. It must be a treat to see your work with life breathed into it. The model is nice. Would love to see some more of the process you went through as a modeller on this project. Keep up the good work man.
Thanks. Yeah it is brilliant to see it brought to life.
I can tell you my process but this is my first time doing this kind of work so it may not be very efficient and there will be people on here who will probably be better suited to give you a decent workflow but this worked for me.
First I make a simple base essentially just taking a box extruding out arms, legs, neck, tail etc with enough loops to pose and stretch I am not too concered with topology at this point since I will not be using it for the full process just to get the basic size and shape.
I take this into Zbrush and use Transpose master to pose and rough out proportions and put it into a pose to work on.
I export this then retopo the model with more workable edges I also make sure the scale is ok at this point.
I bring the new mesh back into Zbrush and start roughing out the creature getting all the big forms in there and do a bit of back and forth with Tim and Chris to make sure the proportions and the overall look are going in the right direction. By the end of this stage we had the overall look pretty much there.
I then export this and take it into topogun to retopo again only this time the model will be for animating so I pay more attention to the edgeflow etc and make sure it has everything Chris needs to animate with it. I will also unwrap the model for texturing. I take this back into Zbrush and reproject the highres details onto the new mesh.
At this point I will export displacement maps and a basic ambient occlusion and send those and the low res to Chris so he could start working out a rig and his shots.
I carry on sculpting and once all the details are there I took a mid res over to Mudbox to texture I just work with Chris and Tim again to make sure all the the creature is looking the way they want. Making sure the details they need are there and adding more if they are required for certain shots. I can just keep sending Chris updated Displacements and textures during this process. At the same time I was also trying to set up the vray shaders for the creature.
During the process there were a few issues getting things like displacements working but I managed to solve them easy enough with a little playing around. I was also having to cope with working on a temperamental laptop which liked to close applications for no reason. Overall it was a good learning experience for me.
For those interested the zero budget indie movie and winner of best sci fi at Dragon Con 2011 James Vs Reality was released for free on youtube last night. If you like a little crazy SyFy style madness and have 25 mins spare check it out and if you do enjoy it please feel free to spread the word. Oh and while I am at it I couldn’t have done this creature without Zbrush so thanks pixologic
Thought I would add some progress shots sorry they are a bit random I did this well over a year ago on an old laptop and this is what I was able to scrape together
a few more. I thought I better point out that initially I was moving back a forth between Zbrush and mudbox as I was using Mudbox for my texturing and doing some early tests.
So if any screens are in the mudbox viewport that is why I thought I best make it clear before someone pulls me on it.
I used Zbrush for all the sculpting work on this and mudbox was just for all the texturing final film renders were in vray.
the EARS! 
the EARS? you’ve lost me