First Things First
Since I'm no good at drawing I always (mostly actually) start out with a moodboard of the model/prop I would like to make.
A moodboard is basically a collection of pictures that you can use as reference, inspiration and to trigger your creativity.
I find myself using this a lot since I am no concept artist like stated above but with this method I can tap on enough inspiration.
After the initial setup I dug in to make the basic Minotaurus shapes by adding and scaling zspheres. The legs and head are actually the main limbs that differ from a human being (and of course the scale).
Now it's time to add some volume as demonstrated on both pictures to the right.
This step is very important because I am going to try and use a technique which let's me sketch with zspheres. So it's very important to make a good armature base with zspheres before one starts to sketch zspheres on top of it.
When the sculpt was ready in my opinion it was time to paint it. I used polypaint on the highpoly model because I'm going to bake all the detail and paint by projecting a high poly model to a unwrapped low poly model.
A lot is done by using images of bison fur and various other creatures with fur/leatherish skins.
After the highres model was finished it was time to retopologize the model. Meaning drawing faces over the highpoly model to make a game acceptable polycount model. This is something that can be done in other programs like Topogun which is quite good from what I've heard but I just decided to stick to zbrushes retopo since it's a all in one package and I could not to be bothered to install another piece of software. The zbrush retopo tools worked quite good, easy symmetry and good snapping.
And here we have the unwrap! Why is it so much fun? Because I use a program called UVLayout. At first the program looks like utter crap, it's definitely not user friendly with it's windows 5.1 interface but the tool is so damn powerful once you learn all the key-binds and the inner workings of it. It has a great previewer and relax tool. I remember we had a lesson where a rock stone was unwrapped, it took like 10+ minutes. I was able to do it in 1 with this unwrapper, absolutely the best tool available in my opinion.
And here we have the endresult rendered with the unreal engine lighting system.
Getting Jiggy with It
After having made a moodboard with all kinds of inspirational pictures it's time to get down to business. I found a front and a side view of the type of model (Minotaurus) that I wanted to make. To start out I made a humanoid mannequin using zspheres to get thei height, width and overall anatomy correct. Since a Minotaurus is kind of a humanoid I find that this is the best way to start to get all the limbs right.
After the initial setup I dug in to make the basic Minotaurus shapes by adding and scaling zspheres. The legs and head are actually the main limbs that differ from a human being (and of course the scale).
Now it's time to add some volume as demonstrated on both pictures to the right.
And here we are! The picture above shows the end result of the zsphere armature.
All we have to do now is press shit+a and start to draw muscles,and make this look like an organic creature.
Breathing Some Life in it
It's finally time to make the zsphere stick figure look like something that has meat on it's bones. I know it's a saying but really, it's literally what I'm going to do which is draw basic muscle volumes to make the model look 'meaty' and to give it some definition before turning the zspheres into a mesh. The left pic is a wip and the right one shows the result that I was happy with to turn into a mesh and to start making a high poly mesh.
Let's make a small jump in time, shall we?
So after the zsphere volume base-mesh it was type to turn the mesh into something sculpt able. The fur parts were made by drawing a mask and extruding it as a separate subtool so it could be individually edited. This part took me the longest by far because it took a lot of research. I googled how body builder muscles looked like, how a cows' snout looks like etc. I also had no clue how to make fur so that's something I had to learn trough googling and in the end it was quite doable, all one needs is a clay brush.
A lot is done by using images of bison fur and various other creatures with fur/leatherish skins.
After the highres model was finished it was time to retopologize the model. Meaning drawing faces over the highpoly model to make a game acceptable polycount model. This is something that can be done in other programs like Topogun which is quite good from what I've heard but I just decided to stick to zbrushes retopo since it's a all in one package and I could not to be bothered to install another piece of software. The zbrush retopo tools worked quite good, easy symmetry and good snapping.
And here we have the retopo'ed result! Only thing missing now is the unwrapping which is one of my favorite things to do. I know I know, people think I'm crazy but hear me out in a sec.
And here we have the unwrap! Why is it so much fun? Because I use a program called UVLayout. At first the program looks like utter crap, it's definitely not user friendly with it's windows 5.1 interface but the tool is so damn powerful once you learn all the key-binds and the inner workings of it. It has a great previewer and relax tool. I remember we had a lesson where a rock stone was unwrapped, it took like 10+ minutes. I was able to do it in 1 with this unwrapper, absolutely the best tool available in my opinion.Let's wrap it up
After the unwrap it time to use zbrush's projection to project high to low poly details.
How this works is you have to subdivide the low poly mesh in zbrush to apolycount matching the high poly sculpt so it can project everything, every lose subtool etc onto 1 mesh. After that zbrush does a calculation between the detail of the 'low poly' HIGH subdlvl and LOW subdlvl and generates the maps for you. This process was very frustarting because the projection took quite some time and if something was wrong you had to tweak it and do the process again. Thankfully I made the actual high poly from some subtools, so for example I could ONLY enable the horns of the HIGH-HIGH poly and project only those to the HIGH-Low poly model. So instead of projecting all at once I learned this was the way to go.
The normal maps still were a bit artifacty so I made them using my favorite baked xNormal for the best and fastest result. The zbrush highpoly had to be exported as a .OBJ but obviously this mesh was way to detailed to be exported as a OBJ so I used the zbrush plugin decimination master to clean it up without real detail loss, exported it and baked the high poly details to a low poly mesh in xNormal.
The normal maps still were a bit artifacty so I made them using my favorite baked xNormal for the best and fastest result. The zbrush highpoly had to be exported as a .OBJ but obviously this mesh was way to detailed to be exported as a OBJ so I used the zbrush plugin decimination master to clean it up without real detail loss, exported it and baked the high poly details to a low poly mesh in xNormal.
And here we have the endresult rendered with the unreal engine lighting system.
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