Making the Carnivore

This was a personal project in 2009 during which I decided to take note of my work flow and share the creation process a bit. It sprung out of my mind without a specific concept and I was able to model, texture, rig, and pose it in 5 days using Max, Zbrush, UVlayout, Body Paint and Photoshop. For my movie, I will use subdivision 3 (as above render).

The model can also be used in a high-end game. I'm using one map for all objects per shader. The textures are 4096x4096 and the finished base mesh is using 13,000 tris.

Day 1

I start out in Max with a box and cut it up to get the rough shape of my model. I try to pay attention to the tesselation and create denser areas where there will be more detail, such as head and limbs.

When I'm happy with the shape and topology of my base mesh, I move on to start the UV layout. I only need to texture one side which I will later mirror and put on the second half of the texture space.

Day 2

Next stage is to export my mesh to Zbrush and start sculpting. The idea I work from is a sort of an unattractive scavenger that feeds off the scraps from his larger cousins.

Day 3

After the rough sculpt is done, I move on to using Zapp link between Zbrush and Photoshop and start painting the color texture. I try to get the proper skin details on the different areas, such as rough bumpy skin for the top of his back and head and softer skin for his underside. I use the finished color map to create the specular and bump map.

Day 4

I want my dinosaur to have some color shifts on his underside and some vertical stripes on his back and to get greater precision I import the mesh to Body Paint so I can overlay these features on seperate layers.

Once texturing has been completed, I can go back to sculpting in Zbrush and 'pop-out' details using my color map as a template. I follow the same texturing procedure for the other seperate meshes (tounge, eyes, eye sockets, claws, teeth).

Now I can render out my normal and displacement maps for all objects and export my base meshes from Zbrush for rigging and rendering in Max.

Above: The base mesh to be imported to Max.

Once I've imported my model to Max, I set up a shader with my texture maps. I also want an ambient occlusion map so I run a texture bake on the base mesh using mental ray. For additional detail in my light map, I grab the green channel from my normal map and overlay it on the AO.

Day 5

Now I have my base mesh in Max ready to be rigged. I build the bone structure and set up my hierarchy and control points. I use a IKspline solver for the tail and tongue and IK for legs and arms. For now, this will be my posing rig only so I am not worrying about perfect control at this time. I proceed with skinning and weighting the model and position the guy in a horribly menacing stance.

...And the final result is rendered with Max's light tracer and 4 spotlights.

Click images for higher res