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.

That naked lady is back.

After listening to many fine comments from people around the net I decided to revisit the base mesh I thought was finished. She really wasn't finished enough.

So may I present her again NOW WITH POLYPAINTING. So textured and with eyes and teeth she is almost ready to go. Oh appart from her seeweed hair which will not stay and was just a test.

One of the things I am really happy about in this piece is the ZB shader I have used. It is a tweaked basic material that I have used for her skin. No Matcap. This way I can still control the light direction in the final renders.

Anyway I am sure I will keep tweaking her but another project has come up that I need to put some time into.

Keep you eyes open for an update. I am off to the Hurricane Festival for a few days this week, need some R and R, so no more udates this week I am affraid.