Modeling of the Dinosaur by Damir G. Martin, Croatia Web: www.dinomonsters.com

When I am finished with modeling and adding details to my model I usually start exporting displacement and normal maps. Also, I am using displacement map to create diffuse, color map of the dinosaur. But that part is done in Photoshop.



To create displacement map you have to do following things:

You need to lower the resolution of the mesh to the lowest subdivision step you will be using in your 3D animation software Max/Maya etc.

For instance, you might not be satisfied with the lowest resolution, since you are losing lot of information regarding scales and the final outcome is just not good enough. So, you might want to use second or even third step. In that case, you must delete lower steps, so that the step you would be using is the lowest one in order to be able to perform extraction of the displacement map.


When you have done this, you need to press the cage button in the geometry dialog. If you have done everything right, your mesh would turn into the spiky looking thing. This is good. Now, all you have to do is to go in the displacement dialog and press “create displacement” and depending on how big your texture is and how fast your computer is, either you will have displacement map or your PC would crash. If you want Normal Map, you can just go to the Normal map dialog and press “Create Normal Map” and if you did everything as explained, it should work fine.

Note: The “texturing” method I used in my image “Carnotaurus Saestri” is completely different.




That’s it. I hope you have gained some knowledge on how to model dinosaur inside ZBrush by read all these steps. In the next pages you will have insight of my approach in creating an illustrative image using photography, compositing and other trickery inside Photoshop to achieve good looking imagery.