"Acorn"

Modeling: Maya
Texturing: ZBrush for displacement and bump maps, Photoshop for everything else
UV's: Headus UVLayout
Rendering: Mental Ray 3.5

Concept: An acorn come to life as a tree spirit.
Goal: To create a complex, asymmetrical, organic creature while still preserving proper edge flow for animation.

The base mesh was created in Maya and then imported into ZBrush where it was subdivided and sculpted to detail. ZBrush was used to create first a displacement map for gradual changes in detail from the base mesh and then, using ZBrush's BumpViewerMaterial, a bump map for high-resolution detail.

Different parts of Acorn require different shader solutions. The "Veins" are linked to the wings' support structures and therefore require areas both with and without sub-surface scattering. The "Hair" and body areas use Fracesca Luce's Mix8Layer to cause the specular highlights to combine with the base shader using a process akin to Photoshop's "screen" blending mode.

"Head"

Modeling: Maya & Mudbox
Texturing: Mainly Photoshop with ZBrush used for blending seams
UV's: Headus UVLayout & Maya
Rendering: Mental Ray 3.5

Concept: A realistic human head.
Goal: To create the appearance of a very high-quality model using displacement and sub-surface scattering on a relatively low-poly mesh.

First, a low-poly and properly edge-looped mesh was created in Maya. Before importing the model into Mudbox for refinement, it had to first be subdivided one time and the UV's layed out with minimal distortion so that Mudbox would have an easy time generating the displacement map.

The shading was done using Maya's Fast Skin Shader with several custom maps and the displacement map output from Mudbox.

"The Blind Ghoul"

Modeling: ZBrush
Texturing: Photoshop through ZApp Link
UV's: ZBrush AUV Tiling
Rendering: ZBrush

Concept: A tormented soul reborn as a Ghoul.
Goal: To create a virtual sculpture using nothing but ZBrush from start to finish.

Using the XYZ Adjust ZExtension, I was able to use ZSpheres to establish a workable base mesh. I did cheat a bit by creating the base meshes for the hands, tongue and jaw in Maya.



The cage was created using ZBrush's default grid texture and then using an Int Mask to first mask and then remove geometry; a technique I learned from a tutorial by Meats Meyer. ZApp Link essentially allows any application to become your painting tool after dropping a model into the Projection Master. In this way I was able to paint the Ghoul's color channel in Photoshop while still having the convenience of AUV tiles.