Zbrush Creature Design

Followed along with a Gnomon workshop by Jerad Marantz that covered creature creation using zbrush and keyshot. 

Quick initial concept.

Reference! My ideas were all over the place and I think it shows in the design. I was pretty eager to get started and didn't spend as long figuring out what I wanted to do as I should have. 

Finished Model.

Slapped on some colour and overlay layers in photoshop to test out colour schemes. Settled on a mixture of hippopotamus and rhinoceros. 

Polypainting in Zbrush

Posing using Transpose Master

Renders straight out of Keyshot using hdr images

The final results after plenty of manipulation, tweaking of render passes, and over-painting.

If only I could have come up with a proper name for this guy. Rendering out a turn table soon, whether or not that turntable will be rendered with Zbrush or Keyshot depends on how long I'm willing to go without use of my computer (Keyshot takes forever).

Kaiju and Cowboys

Some recent paintings and the sketches that preceded them. First up, a cowboy and his trusty steed. 

Kaiju for another Helpful Bear design contest. Kind of a living jet, with anatomical cues taken from leatherback seaturtles, goblin sharks, octopus/squid and flying fish.

 Rough sketches for a wyrm design, and a showman with his vaguely wyrmish pet. The big wyrms up top stem from an idea I had to merge polychaete worms, Mongolian death worms, and European wyrms. They're slithery behemoths that tunnel through dunes and swallow camels, and their "horns" are actually retractable feelers.

The Long Road to Competence

Get ready for a backlog of studies and sketches. I'm pretty comfortable with designing and painting creatures, but for a long time was less so with environments and human characters. In my quest to rectify that I've produced a lot of sketches and rough images, some are studies, others are character thumbnails and exploration. So far I've mostly been tackling people, more environmental stuff to come later.

Below: Some rough ideas for a female protagonist that I've had knocking around in my head forever. She'll be showing up again in the future.

Below: A compiled pile of studies and tests. 

Photo studies below.

Practice environment, used as a test bed for whatever technique I came across. Lasso selections, photo textures and pure painting, etc.

Oil Scraps

Some old oil studies from a painting class.