Hi all, I’d like to share a model I did during my stay at Frantic Films earlier this year. This saltwater brute is called Odobenus Franticus.
This is the first model I have sculpted entirely in ZBrush. It took me quite a while to tame this beast of a program. 
The final model is sitting at 4.5 milion polygons, screenshots were taken in Zbrush 3.1. Basemesh was done in XSI.
Hope you like it!
Model:
Basemesh:
Concept:
hey man its great. keep ot up…i like all the detaile 
you’re killing me always 
that’s damn good 
Very nice work jelmer! Reminds me a bit of the creatures in Surface.
So where are you at now? Headhunters recruit you somewhere else?
Very good look Jelmer…
I like it a lot! What was it used for?
awsome creature design…
always love your skin detail…very flesh look… 
Thanks guys!
mikala: Can’t make anything official yet, but there’s some exciting things hapenning.
Webhead: Thanks man, it’s a general pipeline test creature. Hopefully I’ll be able to see this guy swimming and hunting soon.
great creature! it looks so cool!
Awesome concept and great modeling as always. Keep it up!
Turx, Andreja: Cheers guys
Here are some more shots of the creature. The first 2 images are Mental Ray renders out of Softimage XSI 6, to test the 16bit displacement maps I extracted out of ZBrush 3. I was pretty happy with the amount of detail I was able to gain through these maps.
Mental Ray Displacement (XSI):
Jelmer very cool again and now…
Tex-tu-rize! Tex-tu-rize! Tex-tu-rize!
Yeah, this is your best sculpt until now? Love it!
What combination of nodes you use for Dispalcement in XSI for this images? Do you have any new tips for that?
excellent ZB modeling and great XSI render !
Just a great job.
great work man, always cool to see from concept to work to finish. Can’t wait to see more and see how this guy comes out. I like the design a lot.
really love the look and the weight of this sea creature. He looks just awesome. Hope to see him textured and roaming the Zsea.
Oooooo very nice wish I could comment, but all brilliant work here
Nice to see you back… the sea creature is well done, i like the overbite. looking forward to sea-ing it with textures. I like, that it has the soft forms of a Nar Whale or Sea Lion.
Thank you so much guys! 
Andreja:
Applying 16bit ZBrush 3 Displacement Maps in Softimage XSI
Plug in the image map, in the displacement slot, and insert a ‘change range’ node in between. (If you haven’t flipped your image vertically in Zbrush, you can do this in the transform tab in the image properties.
I have divided the model up in cluters beforehand, so I’m able to assign a different displacement map to the various parts of my model.
My render tree for every part looks somehat like this:
For the ‘change range node’ I used the Alpha Depth Factor from Zbrush.
To figure out what the values for the ‘New Range start’ and ‘New Range end’ are, divide your Alpha Depth Factor by 2.
Mine was 0.7447
so 0.7447 /2 = 0.37235 (0.372)
New Range - Start will be: -0.372
New Range - End will be: 0.372
For the remaining settings I tweaked the Geometry Approximation settings of my model (found under the selection button)
The following settings are important:
under the Displacement tab, I haven’t touched too much besides the Refinement Settings, which I have set to 6. I am in Parametric mode and kept the Max Displace at 1.
Under the Polygon Mesh tab, I have disabled the Discontinuity, by checking off the ‘Automatic’ box.
The subdivision Render Level is another import setting I found, when working with Displacement maps in Softimage XSI. I did some tests with different numbers of sudvisions and it appears that level 2 was the most desirable for me. level 3 only slightly sharpened up the details in the render, but the quadrupled render time, made it not worthy.
The diffence between level 1 and 2 is quite big.
That’s pretty much everything I did. Hope it helps
Great overall look. My question is - for what he needs nostrils if have gills? Or vice versa.