Mantipede...what?

Mantipede, not the greatest title for a piece that I have ever come up with but for some reason the name has stuck.

Right, this is the piece I did for the Pixologic guys (The creators of Zbrush). The idea was to test all the features of the new version of Zbrush by doing a piece for them.

Strangely I chose to create a half man half centipede character. There was a reason. The Zbrush R5 includes the ability to use inset meshes that could be created in a free form across a surface. So the idea was to take a segment of a centipede and string it out over a curve in the scene. Due to some technical issue it ended up just being the upper segments however you can still see centipedes crawling over the characters skin that use the Curve brush inset mesh feature in R5.

As a side note you can actually find the centipede curve brush in Zbrush itself. If you go to lightbox and open the brushes tab there is a folder called 'BetaTestersBrus', in there is the centipede. You can basically create a plane and drag out the curve and watch your very own centipede appear before your eyes. Have fun.

This image again was created and rendered pretty much entirely in Zbrush.