Cool topic - just gonna make this a speedy project so It wont be finished to a high quality or anything. Spent about 4 hours on this so far. Modelled in Maya then detailed in ZBrush. Hope to get the normal map done tonight. Not sure on the scale of this guy yet but I imagine him in an FPS. Maybe chicken size…or maybe 10 feet tall.
OK - Here’s a quick pass at the normal mapping and rigging in Maya - still don’t think I’m getting very good results with normal mapping. I seem to always lose details.
Pre-types winning vote for you
Frickin stunning work - im really envious of you because your 2d stuff is amazing, and the 3d stuff aint arf bad either!
Im gonna have to go back to the drawing board now - my earliest imagining of what my bug would look like was a teeny bit like this one.
Excellent work so far - you sure you havent already worked on this in the past? It looks incredible considering how quickly you knocked this up
Andy H - thanks man - too kind
Bazooka Tooth - I did about 10 thumbnails in Painter before I started - I’ll post them in a sec
If you think about it, its pretty obvious why a model like this can be done quickly.
Most importantly it’s an insect - they are very easy to do in CG because their simple forms are such clear expressions of math.
The body started as just a box and I just extruded the limbs and body parts - very simple.
I then took this in Zbrush. You can turn on mirror X so you only have to detail one side. I just used the std tool. Again very basic stuff but works well with insects.
The UVs were done automatically just to give an idea of how the normal map would look.
Finally I didn’t have to paint any weights for the rig so that took about 15 minutes 
Just knocked up a super rough colour map in ZBrush, to see what colours will work - unfortunatly Maya isn’t quite matching it up properly and seams are showing. I might go back and do proper UV mapping.
erilaz - Cheers bud - They are really fun to do.
Just another render, done in Max this time - looks like I will need to do proper uvs
Hmm… yeah… so when’s the next challenge… 
Seriously, it’s looking pretty nice already, I love all the thumbnails :D.
As a tip you could try to blend the main normal map together with one that has more surface/noise detail in it, for that extra lighting detail.
Are you exporting your normals higher res (e.g. 4096x4096) and then scaling down, or does zbrush even support that – how does that process work? (alt. would you just paint in the details on the map – converting the normal map to a displacement map, then paint on it, then convert back, or would that just be a mess?) Oh, and don’t forget to paint a diffuse map, or the normals will look like burnt plastic… But it looks like you’ve gotten in more detail already to the normals, esp. the ridges on the thorax.
But concept wise (and that insane original model), so deeply cool.:buttrock:
Hey there,
I love it so far! Keep up the good work.
It would be great to see a wireframe or two this early on 
I appreciate it’s not finished yet, but one thing that might be a fun addition is an opacity map applied to the thinest bits of the model… just to make it even more bug-like.
Once again, great work!
Cheers,
Nathan.
This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.
