Bipedal Creature

The aim of this project was revealed as being to design and create a bipedal creature in zBrush.  The first design stage was to come up with some silhouettes in order to block out some rough designs and get an idea of what we want to do. In order that I would not get distracted by a preconceived idea of what I wanted to design I decided to go into the silhouetting stage with a completely empty mind, I banned myself from even giving any consideration to what I could do. This resulted in a couple of really uninspired and boring silhouettes that weren't inspiring me at all, I only did a few (1-5) then took a break.

When I returned I just had a play around with brushes to start with and completely by chance I stumbled onto a brush that I had always had but never really knew what it did. The brush takes the two colours on your colour palette (primary and secondary) and uses the pressure sensitivity to create a gradient between those two colours, in my case hard brushstrokes would be black and light would be red.

This proved to be a pretty nice tool when creating silhouettes, it made it possible to kind of hint toward detail without having to really actually go over the silhouette with a new brush or eraser allowing more detail but maintaining the speed and roughness of silhouettes.

Moving onto silhouettes 6-10, there is an obvious problem, I kind of got carried away with the new brush and almost forgot about the fact that the creature had to be bipedal. I kind of liked where the design was going. The initial silhouette which was created using very vague generic strokes sort of made me think of an insect creature, and I iterated on that sort of refining the design. After silhouette 8 was when I realised that the creature was no longer bipedal so I took the design and tried my best at literally giving the creature two legs to stand on, the problem there came from the fact that you can't really give an insect creature beefy human legs because it just looks silly, and it's near impossible to give a bipedal creature stick thin insect legs, it simply could never support the weight or balance for the lack of muscle. In silhouette 10 I tried to take the four legged variation and push the form a bit to kind of give it the stature of a bipedal creature but just with four legs for support this time, I figured perhaps I could make it a bipedal in spirit despite actually having four legs. I wasn't satisfied with the extent to the bipedal-isation of the 10th silhouette so I took it further in a more detailed iteration of the same design.

In this version I gave the creature a much more humanoid thorax and very human-like arms only with spider like extremities(hands), I also pushed the abdomen up to remove some of the horizontal length of the creature. I'm actually pretty happy with this design now and I am going to take it into a further iterative stage and see if I can take this design further despite being only bipedal in spirit, although it has occurred to me that the two leg limit may not have been as arbitrary as I was thinking, it's possible that the two leg limit may be to do with animation and rigging potential, in other words to be a game ready asset. But I will take this further still and I will have to just check up on it on Monday and have my fingers crossed, in the mean time I should probably consider some true bipedal alternatives to be safe.