The ground work was more or less done at this stage, and I had a better picture of where I wanted to take my creation, so I created a couple of sculpts in ZBrush (Fig.07 – Fig.09).
(Fig.07)
(Fig.08)
(Fig.09)
In ZBrush, the brushes that I used most often for the sculpting were the Standard, Inflat (for fat), Magnify and Move (to position fat, drag it around and pinch to give definition to the crustacean parts more edge definition). The barnacles were created by using a circular alpha and using Drag Rect to draw them onto his body.
Polypainting was done to create a base texture for the creature and later on repainted in Photoshop to add more details (this will be explained in the later parts). The colours used were mainly greens, for a moss-like effect, and reds,to pop certain fleshy areas out. Hints of purple were added to give a feeling of decayed skin in water. Colour spray was used while polypainting to get a good amount of colour variation on his body (Fig.10 & Fig.11).
(Fig.10)
(Fig.11)
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Sculpting the mesh in ZBrush caused the mesh to lose its edge flow so I went through a process of Retopology (Fig.12)
(Fig.12)
1) I exported the lowest level mesh as an .obj
2)
I brought it into Maya, and then made new fresh edge loops that had a proper flow (I also did my best to keep it quads). Next I unwrapped the mesh and then re-imported the newly created mesh into ZBrush as a subtoolof the higher sculpted mesh.
3)
I subdivided the new mesh with the same amount of subdivisions as the sculpted mesh
4)
Now using the Project Allfunction, I re-projected the new subdivided mesh on to the previously sculpted mesh.
Note: Although this process works, there are times when you could get artifacts on your new mesh. The solution to this is to store a Morph targetfirst and then use the Morph brush to slowly correct the mesh distortions.
Now that I had the new mesh with its UV's, I extracted the textures and Normal Maps from ZBrush. The Normal Maps (Tangent Space) and Cavity Maps were created within ZBrush using the ZMapper plugin present in ZBrush 3.1
The textures from ZBrush had to be worked on in Photoshop to add more definition and details to certain areas.
I used a number of photo references and sometimes just hand painted the textures.
