Module 7

OVERVIEW

Materials—MatCap vs. Standard
Downloading and Installing MatCap Materials
Different Approaches
Shape Exploration
Next Stages
Using Reference
Inspiration

Materials
Click to download Ryan's collection of Materials!

Just like with IMM brushes, a quick search on the Internet can yield far more custom MatCap materials than one designer would ever need! Nonetheless, it's fun to explore the possibilities, because some of the materials can be useful in different stages of your design process.

Download, uncompress, and install the supplied materials in the following locations:

Mac: /Applications/ZBrushOSX 4R7/ZMaterials
Windows: C:\Program Files\Pixologic\ZBrush 4R7\ZMaterials
If you're using a version of ZBrush older than 4R7, you will find the folder here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Pixologic\your version here\ZMaterials)

Once you've done this, you can find them in the Material tab of LightBox.

Different Approaches

A couple of approaches for designing a creature are designing from a brief and designing through shape exploration. You might choose one approach over the other depending on whether you're being hired to do a design or just working on a personal project. Also be aware that the procedures and steps particular to each method can vary from company to company.

It is not uncommon for a designer to have very little information when starting a design. But this apparent setback can actually be an exciting opportunity; you get to be the "ideas" person! Remember, you're going to spend a lot of time in the various stages of design creation, so whatever the project's initial limitations, whatever methods you choose to overcome these restrictions, try to enjoy the process of being creative. If you spend all of your time focusing on the end result, on just getting the darn project finished, you'll likely miss out on the rewarding experience that results from channeling your creative energies to meet whatever challenges you may encounter.

Designing from a Brief

Sometimes, as a designer, you'll be given a very specific, very definitive description of the character or creature you are being asked to design (assuming you were hired to do so). You might see this as a constraint, a first challenge to tackle, or you might see how useful such a definitive demand can be. Working within such defined parameters often forces us to come up with creative solutions. It can also focus our energies; a blank canvas and carte blanch as to the designs to be created might seem liberating at first glance. But for some designers, this lack of direction can turn out to be time consuming and eventually intimidating, if not outright debilitating. So it can be helpful to view such precise direction from a client as a positive thing.

Here you'll find a question or many questions that need to be answered. What is this creature's purpose or role in its own community? What is its role in the story? Once these larger questions of the creature's purpose have been answered, you can then turn to more specific details: How does it breathe and smell? What and how does it eat? Does it reproduce? What sounds does it make? How does it communicate and perceive its surroundings?

Here's an example of such a hypothetical creature profile: This alien being is the second highest religious figure in its peaceful tribe. It spends most of its time in a place of worship communicating with the gods. When communicating with the tribal aliens, it uses a purely visual language; facial expressions, gestures, and body movements. The race has been around for hundreds of thousands of years with an average lifespan of about 3,000 years. They are herbivores and quadrupeds with two arms and a long, insect-like torso.

Designing Through Shape Exploration

Keeping in mind the caveat noted earlier on this page, starting a design without much, if any, direction can encourage a playfulness that results in happy accidents and more opportunities to stumble across things you might have never discovered when working in a more controlled, more structured way. This explorative method can be a little like taking a Rorschach test, where you asked to observe and interpret blots of ink.

You will be using this method to design your creature for this module's assignment.

Shape Exploration

When we start a design, we are just looking for shapes (or silhouettes) and primary forms. Remember the work process we discussed in previous modules? Of going from large to small, broad to specific, primary to tertiary? That still applies!

Starting from a simple primitive shape, like a sphere, and using brushes like Move, MoveElastic and SnakeHook can be an effective way to explore shapes. Let's start with a DynaMesh sphere with the DynaMesh resolution set to 32.

Select a brush like the Move, MoveElastic or SnakeHook, and with a large brush size, start pushing and pulling the sphere around. Don't forget to activate Symmetry by pressing the "x" button on your keyboard. Try to "deform" or distort the sphere so much that the spherical shape is no longer present. If you need to use DynaMesh to fix stretching polygons, do so. Remember to only add resolution as you need it. At this stage, you might need to use DynaMesh but will probably not need to add resolution.

It's best to turn off the floor grid at this point. We want to trick the analytical side of our brain and let the creative side take control. You don't want your brain to know up is up and down is down.

Zoom out and tumble around so that you're looking at your model from multiple angles. For example, flipping your model to where what you thought was the top is now the bottom can reveal things you hadn't seen before. Again, we are exploring here and want to see as much as we can. This iteration could work as a stretched-out head you might see on some sort of quadruped (A), but when turned upside down and rotated, it could be seen as an elongated head on a bipedal creature (B).

Make sure to orient your model before moving on. We want our heads to be facing the Positive Z direction. Turn the floor back on and use any or a combination of the following commands to orient your model: Transpose Rotate, Mirror, (which you can access by going to Tool > Deformation>Mirror), or the Preview sub-palette.

Use the Unify command for each iteration you make. (Go to Tool>Deformation>Unify to access this command.) This will make their relative size and placement in 3D space consistent. In this image you see several SubTools stacked in the SubTool panel. You can view them by turning on the Solo mode and using the Up Arrow and Down Arrow keys to cycle through the individual SubTools.

Once you find a shape that you think you might want to take to the next stages, duplicate the SubTool and continue working on the duplicate. Turn off visibility on the original SubTool and save it for later. Do this several times. Often, we have to spend some time loosening up to get to the real creative stuff.

Start "deforming" the duplicate to explore a completely new shape. You might even try using Tool>Deformation>Mirror (X, Y, and/or Z) to give yourself a fresh perspective.

Since we are searching for interesting primary forms at this stage, avoid zooming in close to your model. Try different brushes if you'd like but stick with a large brush size. Some more useful brushes at this stage are TrimDynamic, SoftConcrete, Standard, Clay, and ClayBuildup.

Play with different materials. In particular, it can be useful to switch to the Flat Color material (in the Standard Materials) or the Outline material (in MatCaps) to look at your sculpting for only the shapes that it's creating (i.e., its silhouette).

From the variations you create, you will have to choose one to carry through to the following stages of the design process. When you know which one you variation to work on, select that SubTool and use Clone to copy it into its own ZTool. Switch to the new ZTool and save it as a separate ZTL file which you can continue to work on.

Modifying the Smooth Brush

Go to Brush>Modifiers>Brush Modifier. Working with the Brush Modifier will control whether a brush affects only the high points or only the low points. A higher setting will affect the low points and, conversely, a lower setting will affect the high points. To modify the Smooth brush, press Shift while adjusting this setting.

Reference

Most successful creature designs are based on the real-world creatures. Nature has an endless supply of animals that can serve as references; from sea life to land-based mammals to birds to microorganisms, the animal kingdom is rich in inspiration for when you are looking to craft a distinctive visual language for your own design creations. You'll find that most successful creature designers have a strong interest in nature and call upon natural forms and movements to inspire their work.

It's a common mistake to simply cut and paste parts of various creatures together to make one new "composite creature." You don't just put a lion's tail and a bird's legs on a hippo's body and top it off with a giraffe's neck and head. This kind of randomness—when the artist's vision becomes too removed from believability—can make it difficult, if not impossible, for the viewer to connect to the design.

To protect your design from reaching such levels of visual absurdity, try using the 70:20:10 ratio:

70 percent of your design is influenced by an ape
20 percent of your design is influenced by some sort of insect, say, a beetle
10 percent of your design is influenced by a lizard

Using this model will help keep your creature design grounded, giving it a more authentic, real-world look—no matter how crazy or outlandish some of the tertiary details get. A believable design will seamlessly blend anatomical elements together from various sources. The goal is to have a creature that one could imagine seeing function in a real world.

The earlier you build a personal reference library the better. Many designers use sites like Pinterest to store images because they don't have to save files that take up disk space on their computers. Pinterest also boasts helpful organizational tools, and it's easy to browse through lots of images. Alternatively, you might download images from the Internet into a folder on your desktop, or you could even look through magazines like National Geographic. If you're feeling nostalgic, get yourself a three-ring binder to save cutout images. And perhaps the most rewarding way of gathering reference photography is taking pictures yourself! Go to the zoo, for example, and shoot photographs animals there, or take pictures of sea life at an aquarium. The more thoroughly you observe or study nature, the broader your visual library will be and the more you'll have to pull while working on your designs.

You'll want to keep a general library of creature reference—having this collection categorized (bugs, sea creatures, humans, birds, and so on) is advisable but not required—that you can source from when creating specific designs. You will likely not use all of your images all of the time, but a well-stocked, well-organized archive can help direct your design approach—you can use images to create an idea board, for example—and make it easier to pull images relevant to your current project.

Inspiration

It's always good to have designers to look at for inspiration. On the Internet there is almost too much inspiration; it's easy to get lost in a sea of images—some great, but many not. If you come across designers whose work you find especially impressive, seek out their work and save it to a Pinterest board or some place you like to store images. Then take a look at their other work, methods, and history to understand what they do, how they do it, and how they learned to do it.

Some designers you might look into are:

Wayne Barlowe