Your images are great. But at the end of the day, all that you’re giving us are images. This is a ZBrush forum, and it would be really awesome if you could provide insights about how ZBrush contributed to what you’re showing! 
aurick: Thats a fair point, my thoughts were that if people asked specific questions then I would answer in direct response rather than typing a lot of stuff that might get ignored. I’m currently waiting to start a new job and my laptop doesn’t run zbrush so rather than taking grabs from zbrush I’m fishing out renders from my reel for which zbrush was used extensively. I’ll explain some of my workflow below unfortunately I don’t have access to supporting images at the moment.
my workflow is pretty standard. for the character work a low res uv’d meshes is exported from max into zbrush. I concentrate on decent anim topology at this early stage so that i don’t have to do much retop work later. i also try to avoid tris and avoid large variation in quad size as this will work better when subdividing in zbrush.
sculpting is done solely in zbrush as well as the majority of texturing. at the texturing stage i would jump between zbrush and ps to layer in some detail from photo ref as well as overall colour, level changes.
once I’m happy with the character I use zmapper to do a quick test of how the model looks when normal mapped. If i’m happy with this then I’ll export the top level and the bottom level back to max as well as exporting the final texture. the reason I re-export the low res mesh is that I tend to alter the overall form quite a bit in zbrush, tweaking the silhoette and therefore altering the original mesh a lot.
the new low res mesh is brought back into max where I check the topology and uv’s making any changes where necessary. If the mesh has been stretched in any particular places while altering the overall form then I will go in and add loops etc where necessary.
in max i’ll run a pro optimise on the high res model so that it doesn’t grind to a halt when rendering to texture. I’ll eyeball this and reduce the model just upto the point where i notice a visable change. often I can get rid of hundreds of thousands of tris without much noticable difference as pro optimise works pretty efficiently.
I will make sure that both models have decent smoothing groups and then I use mental ray to transfer the normal and occlusion maps from the high res model to the new low res model. The occlusion map is then multiplied over the zbrush exported colour map in photoshop as the game engine doesn’t support true ambient occlusion mapping.
The game models are then posed and rendered using mental ray in max. Final gather, GI and fast sss skin shaders for skin. Renders use the game normal, specular and colour maps as well as a sss mask to tone down or remove the sss effect in certain areas of the mesh.
For the non organic stuff like the food table and the robot, zbrush was mainly used for surface texture work and was not used to change the form of the meshes. the meshes go into zbrush one at a time and worked on individually. the robot went in as a complete mesh and involved a lot of masking, in hindsight subtools would have worked better.
I understand that the less organic work doesn’t sit so well in this forum but zbrush is used on all these images at some stage of the process.
if anyone has any questions please let me know.
Thanks for explaining that.
So good old poly modelling skill is still a necessity to have.
How long did it take to put together one of those still lifes? Im guessing its a lot of work.
And the hair on that barbarian is amazing, That would be in 3dsmax to do that right? with individual hair folacles.
rouncer: yes, still using poly modelling, haven’t quite got to grips with z-spheres yet. Those still lifes took a while, probably around a week for both as they share some elements, lots of back and forth between max and zbrush.
The barbarian hair was done in max, a few splines were set up to influence length and shape in certain areas and then all this hard work was blown out of shape with a wind simulation. the anim is at the end of my reel which you can see on my site link below.
Hi darrenW! Great new pics! Thanks for the walkthrough! Gonna’ check out your site tonight! 
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thanks etcher, hope you like it.
I’m pretty much out of images now. thanks for all the positive input guys, sorry I couldn’t add more supporting images as far as walkthroughs go.
Hi DarrenW, yep I liked it -it’s clean and to the point-! ! Great to see all the creatures in action! ! Lookin’ forward to your next posts! !