This project was a self allotted assignment for becoming software agnostic, in terms of texture painting. I am a Mari user, never bothered to even check out Zbrush's Polypainting. Tried it and had lot of fun and it was really cool, even if it isn't as powerful as Mari for texturing. I used Keyshot for rendering & keyshot was really awesome too.
I got the model from Bad King's Monster Mega Pack & it was kindly donated to badking by Josh Crockett. So a big thanks to Josh & the guys at badking for the wonderful sculpt that tingled my imagination.
Here them communicate. Better heard with headphones.
A female Erath Parasite
Keyshot renders. It was a little difficult to get used to, for first couple of tires, in comparison to rendering in Maya with Vray or Arnold. But Keyshot is really cool with such awesome real-time feedback & very friendly user interface. It was fun!
The creature was UV'ed in Zbrush and exported as obj and import inside Keyshot along with polypaint data.
I did not create a separate reflection map or bump map. All the tertiary details were painted in ZBrush with alpha before polypainting the model. So basically I got the spec break up and displacement for free as I imported my 3-MIL POLY right into Keyshot and Keyshot surprised me by rendering it like it was nothing. I did not get any maps into keyshot except polypaint, everything else was generated inside Keyshot.
About the Erath Parasite, the motive for texture look development:-
These elusive carnivorous parasitic creatures are found in wet & damp places in rain-forest of Erath. They are completely blind, to hunt and survive they rely entirely on scent, which they absorb from air using something similar to Jacobson's organ found in snakes, they have similar organ present on the base of their thick skull shell, towards the front. Some have been known to communicate using echolocation like bats.
They hunt in groups of three or more - After a successful hunt, they latch on to an area on their prey and stay there sucking on the dissolving bones and muscles for days, every nutrient is slowly sucked by the opening they have at tip of their smaller fangs, the brood generally consist of two males and three or more females with their eggs and young. Its observed on a larger prey around five to six of these ghastly creatures clinging.
The prey is paralysed by somewhat similar toxin to botulinus toxin, the death is slow and painful.
They have soft & translucent skin near the neck, and as it goes up the skull is thick and coloured vibrantly. Males have less saturation to their skull shell and marks from occasional duels - the females have slight glowy skin on their neck. Their sticky saliva helps them digest bones and muscles of their prey so they can suck up the sticky juice. Like the black mamba, these creatures have a distinctive colour to their mouth.
If threatened, they spray a slimy sticky saliva that causes extreme itching and irritation to skin.
Due to their elusive & nocturnal nature, human confrontation is less.
Due to their elusive & nocturnal nature, human confrontation is less.
Thank you for visting
