Lurking in the Deep

This project started really as a quick sculpt in ZBrush over a couple of hours during an evening. As the sculpt turned out well enough, I decided to finish the piece. I've been working on and off it for the last two months in the little spare time I've had.

I started out with a very rough model in modo which had the correct scale and proportions. I then brought it into ZBrush where I really defined the design. Once I was happy with it, I retopologized it in modo, where I also did my UVs, along with UV Master in ZBrush. I had to redo the topology several times until I was satisfied. At this point, I brought it back into ZBrush to finish off the details. This took a while. I then brought the fish into Mudbox for texturing, which I find to be an excellent application for texture painting. Once the texture was working, I painted a variety of maps, including SSS color, SSS amount, specular and so forth to really control the shading. I brought it all into modo for shading, lighting and rendering. I split it into two passes and composited it all in Photoshop.


You can find a video with turnarounds here:
[link]