MAYA | ZBRUSH | MARI | SUBSTANCE PAINTER | ARNOLD | XGEN | PHOTOSHOP
CRAFT A PHOTOREALISTIC CREATURE RENDER
Character modeller at Scanline VFX, Riley Nelson, details how he created this amazing chimp render
Riley Nelson, Riley is a character modeller at Scanline VFX in Los Angeles. Previously, he built assets at Crafty Apes and Framestore for films, TV shows and commercials. artstation.com/riley_nelson
CAPTURING REALISM I created this chimpanzee render to experiment with high-resolution displacement and grooming workflows
AUTHOR
This tutorial is an overview of the entire process I used to create a chimpanzee render, from modelling, texturing and grooming, to lighting and compositing. It requires a basic knowledge of ZBrush, a poly modeller such as Maya or 3ds Max, a texturing package of choice, and Photoshop.
My tutorial focuses on creating a still, which will allow us to skip the process of rigging, CFX and animation. However, even if your final output will not be animated, spending time on retopology and UVs is worthwhile. Good topology with no spirals or Ngons will ease the process of creating highquality UVs. Clean UVs will allow you to effectively use texturing packages such as Mari and Substance Painter.
Instead of finishing one pipeline step and moving on to the next, I created a render as soon as possible, with a camera and first pass of lighting. Therefore, I could see how my sculpt and textures held up under a specific composition and lighting condition. Accordingly, there was some back and forth in the modelling, texturing, lookdev, and lighting phases. Every artist works their own way, so experiment with your process and see what is most effective for you.