Designing a Fantasy Creature from Reality in ZBrush
In this ZBrush tutorial, you'll expand your knowledge and skill set with more than just sculpting tools and ideas. Software required: ZBrush 4R6, KeyShot 5.
What you'll learn
In this ZBrush tutorial, you'll expand your knowledge and skill set with more than just sculpting tools and ideas. We'll base our starting point on a real-life animal and design our custom creature from there. We'll put ourselves on a "deadline" to present this concept to the film director as an example; our focus is going to be design and function. We'll be trying to understand the underlying bone structure first, then move on with our more traditional sculpting tools in order to achieve our result. After fleshing things out, we'll discuss detailing, final rendering, and post-work in Photoshop. By the end of this ZBrush training, you'll have a solid understanding of how to approach your own unique design ideas using nature as a starting point. Software required: ZBrush 4R6, KeyShot 5.
Table of contents
- Developing Ideas for Our Creature Design 9m
- Creating a ZSphere Base 7m
- Blocking Out the Body Anatomy 10m
- Continuing to Block out the Body 10m
- Completing Our Body Blockout 10m
- Sculpting the Face 10m
- Refining Our Face Design 10m
- Utilizing Thumbnail Techniques for Iterative Design 7m
- Adding Teeth to Our Creature 10m
- Creating Wings for Our Creature 10m
- Sculpting the Feet 10m
- Designing a Defense Mechanism 7m
- Perfecting Our Sculpt 10m
- Improving the Facial Sculpt 10m
- Adding Facial Details 8m
- Applying Skin Detail Techniques 10m
- Setting up Our KeyShot Scene 9m
- Implementing Texture Photobashing 11m
- Continuing to Add Textures to Our Render 10m
- Finalizing Our Render 11m
About the author
Lee Magalhães graduated from the Istituto Europeu di Design (IED) in São Paulo with a bachelor’s degree in Digital & Virtual Design. He is currently a freelance 3D artist and has worked on a variety of projects in the industry, from basemesh models for Mudbox releases to high quality models for movies and games. He focuses on character art, anatomy, and digital sculpting.