
Speed up your ZBrush workflow by enabling customize and arranging brushes in the interface. Create a custom hotkey menu, assign shortcuts, and save your configuration for faster access.
Concept a bulky crocodile-headed cyborg creature by blending organic and metallic parts, armor, and tubes to craft a striking silhouette through quick mood-board inspired sketches.
Explore 3d sculpting of a cyber reptile head using move and inflate brushes, dynamic subdivisions, and smoothing to refine anatomy, scales, and mechanical details.
Develop a 3d sketch of a reptile, shaping broad shoulders and a crocodile-inspired head with teeth and spikes, guided by anatomy references, masking, and symmetry in a dynamic sculpting workflow.
Forge a cyborg reptile jaw by sculpting teeth, tubing inserts, and hydraulic details, then refine with dynamic subdivision, symmetry, and metal finishes for a detailed 3D model.
Advance the 3d sketch of the cyber reptile's legs by shaping muscles and mechanical parts, adding hinges, inserts, and cable paths, balancing thickness and detail through iteration.
Design and refine a reptile game hand, constructing a finger using cylinders, applying symmetry, poly groups, and extrusion to create a low-poly, articulated model.
Refining continues guides you through practical sculpture steps, managing topology and geometry, applying symmetry, and preparing a low-poly in-game cyber reptile character with a future normal map pass.
Refine the crocodile cybernetic model by adjusting geometry, reducing polygons, adding texture and scales, shaping the jaw hinge, and planning smoothing and subdivision steps.
Create crocodile scales on a cyber reptile by refining topology, subdividing for high and low poly detail, and projecting work onto the head.
Create a cyber reptile's back and shoulder scales using clay and standard brushes, refining with alpha textures, subdivision, and masking, then save and export the alpha for reuse.
Learn to refine a cyber reptile character by shaping geometry with move brush, adding creases, symmetry, masking, and density tricks to build layered scales and polish.
Continue refining crocodile-like scales on the cyber reptile game character by masking, subdividing, and applying custom alphas to achieve a crocodile-ish pattern.
Refine the cyber reptile game character's leg by smoothing and adjusting scales, making key scales pop, and planning back versus front scale thickness with organic textures.
Create a crocodile character by shaping with symmetry, sculpting with clay brush, refining topology and geometry, using mirroring, subdivision, and references, while practicing, staying passionate, and pursuing industry-ready quality.
Begin by building main forms before adding details, inflate and smooth to craft organic shapes, then duplicate, mirror, and project low-poly geometry to create piston and cylinder details for posing.
Instructor Info
Nikolay Naydenov is a Senior Character Artist currently working in Gameloft. Nikolay always had deep interest in art. In his spare time he was either reading a book or scribbling on a notebook ever since he was a child. He has been in the game industry since 2007 and had worked in many projects. The project that he is most proud of is the game titled March of Empires. He loves his job as a character artist especially when he is given freedom to do his own concepting and ideas. His advice for everyone just starting out is to spend lots of time learning software programs, be efficient and fast, and also spend many hours learning the anatomy, studying faces, and muscles underneath the skin. As every profession, to be good at something, you have to practice a lot. He recommends students to always look for improvement and never settle. He believes good things require sacrifice of time and other pleasures and this can turn your passion into a profession.
Course Info
In this course, we will go through the process of creating a cyber crocodile creature from a sphere to a finish render in Zbrush. We will start by doing the 3D sketch of our model which will allow us to change the design quickly and easily on the fly. This will be achieved by using one of the new features in Zbrush, which is Sculptris Pro. The Sculptris Pro mode will help us in the concepting stage and in the final polishing of our crocodile skin. You will learn different techniques for hardsurface modeling and mechanical parts creation. This will include Zmodeler brush, Trim Dynamic brush, and making your own Insert Multi-Mesh brush. The big part of the tutorial will be the detailed creation of crocodile scales. We will make them either by hand or using alpha brushes. In order to do that, you will learn how to make your own alpha brushes from scratch. At the end, we will make the pose for our high poly sculpt and lastly, we will export render passes which we will combine in Photoshop to achieve a nice professional looking render.