Tsastii (creature, WIP)

Hi everyone, new to these forums. I wanted to share a wip for a fan art on a creature. There isn't much of reference images as the creature is from a game. The ss is as below. The creature is known as a tsastii. I have no idea how to pronounce it. =) A lot of room for imagination to fill in.



I've done a low poly dynamesh zbrush sculpt, ss below. My idea is to portray the creature as a 2/3 storeys monster with 5 mouths and tongues and armored rear (to protect the brains/organs). Eventually, I'll rig it and pose. Its been tough deciding how best to texture it. Could go zerg-like or cartoony...I have no idea.



To-do list

• manual retopo on the head - wip
• zremesh the teeth/gums/huge tongue, add in generic tongues for the 5 heads
• high frequency detail sculpt on the skin around the mouth and the back ridges
• and a lot more to go...

Is this meant to be a realistic take of the character? It does look a top heavy, so you may want to add more to the base if so.

I really like the character concept though. Are you going to add the tongues as separate bits of geometry?

I was beginning to lose hope that this thread would appear. :P



Yes, proportions is something I'm struggling with. I want it realistic enough that fans of the game should be able to identify the model with the 2d character in game. Maybe the bottom tongue should be slightly longer and wider, like a gorgon's tail or something... It will be rigged separate from the head, that should give it some design leeway.



Yes, its just 1 tongue duplicated and separately rigged. Composition is going to be tough.



So I scaled the bottom a little, did the hp sculpt on the head. I think the bottom has improved somewhat but still lacking the more realistic deformation of a weight bearing appendage. Its going to be something that I hope rigging can solve.

Baking textures for the head now, comments welcome !

Baked the AO, cavity, normal and height maps for the head. Did a quick specular map and a simple render for comparison. Looks like there's a loss of quality in the cavities. I wonder if the zbrush material shader is causing the difference.

Leaving the final color texture and the subsurface scatter for last. Moving on to the gum/teeth sets.

High poly sculpt on 5 sets of teeth done. Baked basic textures for 5 sets of teeth, no spec pass yet. I wonder how I'm going to get that wet slimy look in the mouth. As usual, leaving color map for last. Tweaked the head shader a little.




woot, the nightmare of dentists !

Added in tongues, no color/ss maps yet. No rigging either. The first blockout phase is done. Moving on to the iterative passes for each component.




Priority list:
head: redo sculpt on the mouths, add tension. skin shader needs rework, gloss is off. redo ao/cavity map.
teeth: redo sculpt, needs thickness and roughness.
tongue: insufficient high frequency detail. Does it even feel like tongues ?

Iteration pass on the head, adding in definition and some details.

Small update. Fixed a whole bunch of stuff, painted the color maps, added in sss. Low sample renders of the results so far.






Next up is rigging, blood, composition etc
Any feedback/comments/critiques welcome.

Update: model is rigged and posed. (I'm not the best rigger and this non-humanoid form isn't helping. :( ) Many hours on test rendering, posing and finding camera angles. This is the best I came up with. Imo, it suxs. If anyone have comments, feel free to reply/PM. Riggers/animators feedback welcome. I don't mind negative/brutal comments, the worst feedback is no feedback...



Yeah, also added a couple of dismembered limbs. Composition: Going for creature feeding in a cave/dungeon. Supposed to be an open air cave with a high ceiling. Blood, saliva, environment etc all coming in later. Thanks for reading.

Added blood, saliva, environment. Below is my final still. Not the best result but meets the objective of a fan art piece. Thanks to all who gave feedback and to any who followed this thread. Looking forward to another piece, hopefully soon... cheers!


Sculpted in Zbrush, textures baked with Xnormal, rigged and posed in Blender, rendered with Cycles, post pro in Blender and Gimp. Rendered in 75 mins with AMD Phenom II X6 1055T.