ZBrushCentral

Ballistic Publishing's Essence: Creatures

I’m incredibly honored to share with everyone a great project I was involved with. I was a coauthor for Ballistic’s Creative Essence: Creatures. For the past few months I have been designing, sculpting, sketching, and writing along with Andrew Baker, Simon Webber, Martin Rezard, Josh Herman, Ian Joyner, James Van Den Bogart, and Aris Kolokontes. A majority of us used ZBrush for our sculpting and design process. The book is over 250 pages and filled with never before seen creatures from each artist. We share not only our techincal process but our creative thought process on designing creatures for film and game projects. Here is just a small sample from my contribution to the book.

Thumbnails for the Rhinodino
Rhinodino_sketches2.jpg

Speed Sculpts exploring the design of the Rhinodino
Rhinodino_bodysketches.jpg

The final Rhinodino sculpt
Rhinodino_FinalSculpt.jpg

BPR render and various material passes used for creating the final image. My main goal is to create a color, specular, cavity, lighting, and depth pass. I will also use various matcaps and photo overlays to create variation in the final image.
Rhinodino_RenderPasses.jpg

The final Rhinodino concept.
Rhinodino_fullbody_01_LARGE.jpg

You can see more of the book here…
http://www.ballisticpublishing.com/books/essence/creature/index.php

Hello everyone. Total honor to be a part of this book. I think you guys will really like it. Thank you to Bryan and the Ballistic crew for letting me be a part of this!

Here are a few images from my section, for a character I called “The Mantapup”. From rough sketch, to model to final image. I have a few more final creatures and a bunch of random zbrush doodles.

A rough sketch of what this critter might be…

sketch.jpg

After getting a few ideas down (iterations and stages shown in the book) and a rough dynamesh sculpt I retopped and Finished the sculpture…
sculpt_001.jpg

The final image after polypaint and layer passes direct from zbrush comped in photoshop.

final.jpg

To see full breakdowns of this and other creatures check out Essence!

Hey everyone! So happy to be able to finally show this and be able to be a part of this amazing experience.

I’ve got a few images that show my progression from “sketch” to final renders. I don’t really do much 2d work, so most of my ideas are thought through and kind of evolve naturally. As you can see below, the image almost looks like an evolutionary chart till I get the final design.

SlarkProgressionSmall.jpg

After I got my final design, I decided to render it out from a profile to show it off in full color and make the design clear to the viewer.

SlarkSideSmall.jpg

After I made a render that showed the design, I really wanted to do something more dynamic and get to play with the composition. This one took me a lot longer because I had to figure out what composition I wanted, then had to pose each character and put them in one scene.

SlarkGroupShotSmall.jpg

I hope you all get a chance to check out the book!

Attachments

SlarkGroupShotSmall.jpg

SlarkProgressionSmall.jpg

SlarkSideSmall.jpg

You sir have a talent :D. Love the concept work and the final pieces but most of all the creature design is top row :smiley:

Hi , I still can’t believe my luck, being invited to participate in this amazing project with so many talented and inspired artists , the whole experience has truly been a blast!
My name is Martin Rezard, I work as a sculptor , special make up effects artist and creature/character designer for films and TV shows.

here is a sample of the work I have done for the book,
first is a sketch studying the silhouette.
01-feline sketch01-lowrez.jpg

then a progression of the sculpt, the head was buit from a dynamesh sphere, the body was created with zspheres then turned into a dynamesh.
02-feline sculpt progress-lowrez.jpg
then a color test, done in photoshop on a grey render.
03-feline predator colour study-lowrez.jpg
and finally, a render test of the finished posed model.
feline render test-lowrez-rgb.jpg
you will be able to see much more in the book, as well as a whole lot of bigger and better creatures …
I sincerely hope you will enjoy this book as much as we did making it!

thanks for looking.04-feline render test-lowrez.jpg

Attachments

01-feline sketch01-lowrez.jpg

02-feline sculpt progress-lowrez.jpg

04-feline render test-lowrez.jpg

feline render test-lowrez-rgb.jpg

I had a great time collaborating with these guys on this book! While working on commercial projects can be quite fun, it rarely leaves the oppertunity to do “what one wants”.

This is GEILO, an engineered type creature I created for the book where you can see my process of taking the sculpture from ZBrush and turning
it into an illustration, rendering out and working with multiple shaders and passes from Zbrush and putting together the final image in Photoshop.

GEILO_fullBod_FIn_AJB.jpg
GEILO_fullBod_Sculpt_AJB.jpg
Some of the layers I render out from Zbrush. I enjoy rendering out a lot of different shaders and trying different blending modes for any “happy accidents”.
renderCOmp_AJB.jpg
renderCOmp_Post_AJB.jpg

Big thanks again to Bryan for putting us all in one spot! A privilege to be featured with such amazing artists :slight_smile:

Attachments

GEILO_fullBod_Sculpt_AJB.jpg

renderCOmp_Post_AJB.jpg

Insanely lovely work andrew! Hope i can spare some of my student money to afford this book. It looks great! Love the render and the design. Very appealing!

fantastic work guys! so much awesomeness in that book its a must have!

This is absolutely inspiring! Love the creativity and execution in these pieces!

Fantastic work!!! love to see more!!

Awesome works here! I love your concept creatures! about the last sea creatures did you paint them in zbrush or after in photoshop?

Amazing creatures!!! Congrats for the book! :+1:

Very nice! Love it

Very nice work! You are getting better and better piece after piece! Bravo! and thanks for sharing! :+1:

Crazy works!)

It was an incredible honor to be picked to work on this book with so many talented individuals. It was a rare project and a very motivating and humbling experience.

CHUB
code named chub. this little romper was my attempt to make something cool out of a simple shape. It was more of a personal challenge to see if i could make something interesting and cool with a circle as a silhouette. Here are a few of the work in progress images from his construction.

chub09.jpg

This was my starting stage. He was initially meant to be amphibious and more of a playful design before he became the bee eating psycho path he is now.
chub01.jpg
This is stage 2 and I dove to deep into the pangolin scales and couldn’t seem to make it work as anything other than that. He also looked too kung fu panda for my personal taste.
CHUB04.jpg
The image below shows a sort of progression of new heads. With design stuff i like to keep the head separate so that I’m able to rapidly prototype as many combinations as possible.
CHUB05.jpg
here are some color test i like to do during my design process to try new patterns and color combinations that i wouldn’t normally attempt otherwise.
chub06.jpg

Attachments

chub01.jpg

CHUB04.jpg

CHUB05.jpg

chub09.jpg

How did you made that scales on the wip? is it a IMM brush?

Damn, your work is quite inspiring! Fantastic gallery!

very cool, I like them.:smiley:

Very inspiring creatures. Well done guys the book looks great