Making of the Alien Nature by Pascal Raimbault, New Zealand Web: www.cgfeedback.com

It's a good way to get a rough idea about where I will need to spend more time, and put some temporary lighting. Here I am using only 3 spotlight casting deep map shadows to get a fast render.

Now adding details into ZBrush and mudbox for the ground. I like to use both application has the brushes don't feel the same and the results are often different. The malletFast brush can give you nice and sharp details quickly, and I love mudbox to change the proportions add new design features. It's very handy to know where the camera is looking at as you don't need to add much details on not visible areas.

Here my model is 2.5 M polys for the ground.

Once I am done detailing the ground I extract the subd level 0 from mudbox and ZBrush. I do the UVS in maya and UV layout to achieve less stretching as possible, which will help at extraction time. Mudbox does a great job at extracting 32 bit maps, and renderman will render them perfectly. If I get some spikes in the displacement I just clamp them in the shader in maya using the clamp node. (could be done in shake too.)

Some ZBrush screenshots for the creature itself (8 M using around 20 subtools).

zbrush

Here is a render of the hero SUBD model + extracted displacement maps using a simple 3 spotlights rig. Renderman deep shadows can help faking occlusion for faster renders.

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