Making of The Cursed Pirateby Rohan Oka, India/Canada Web: www.rohanoka.com


In Zbrush: The brushes that I used most often in sculpting were the Standard, Inflate (for fat) and the Magnify, Move to position fat and drag it around and pinch to give definition to the crustacean parts and give more edge definition. The Barnacles were created by using a circular alpha and using Drag Rect to draw them onto his body.

Poly painting was done to create a base texture for the creature and later on repainted in Photoshop to add more details (will be explained in the later parts). Colors used were mainly Greens (for a moss like effect and Reds to pop certain fleshy areas out). Hints of Purple were added to give a feeling of decayed skin in water. Color spray was used while poly painting to get a good amount of color variation on his body.



Sculpting the mesh in ZBrush caused the mesh to loose its edge flow so went through a process of Retopology.

1. First i exported the lowest level mesh as an .obj
2. Brought it into Maya, then made new fresh edge loops that had a proper flow (also did my best to keep it quads), unwrapped the mesh and then reimported the newly created mesh in ZBrush as a subtool of the higher Sculpted mesh.
3. Subdivided the New Mesh with the same amount of subdivisions as the Sculpted mesh
4. Now using the Project All Function Reprojected the New Subdivided Mesh on to the Previously Sculpted Mesh.
5. Note: Although this process works, there are times when you could get artifacts on ur new mesh. Solution to this is to store a Morph target first & then use the morph brush to slowly correct the mesh distortions .

Now I have the new mesh with its Uv's. I extracted the Textures and Normal Maps from ZBrush.


The Normal Maps (Tangent Space) and Cavity Maps were created within Zbrush using the Zmapper plugin present in Zbrush 3.1. The textures from ZBrush had to be worked on in photoshop to add more definition and details to certain areas. I used a mixture of Photo References and sometimes just did hand painted textures.



Skin Texture: Created using images from the web and some parts hand painted. The cavity map was overlayed on this to pop the texture more.